IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today we played a new math game called The Train Game. This game you try and get your bear from one side to the other side of “train” (a stick of unifix cubes) first. You have to roll the dice and whatever number you roll on that is how many cubes you can move. The first person to get to the other side gets a marker. The person who gets the most markers wins. Our friends really LOVED playing this game, and what they did not know is that they were learning (ex. one to one correspondence, identifying numbers (the dice had digits instead of the standard numbers), and showing good sportsmanship.

I gave each friend a cup at the end of the day with a challenge: put it outside after school today and see if their cup would fill up from the rain! I gave them the option of taking a picture of their cup outside, drawing what happened, and\or writing down what happened to the cup when all of the rain came. Then they can bring their work in on Monday to let us know what happened! They were excited about this challenge!

Today at recess we noticed that the clouds were rolling in and we were noticing that the air felt different. We decided to grab some clipboards and paper and do an observational drawing outside of the clouds. We got great drawings and the children were noticing shapes in the clouds as well-like a dragon!

Our class has really been enjoying yoga.  We go to Yoga every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning with Mrs. Williams.  (On Mondays and Tuesdays we do it together in our classroom!) The students have been excelling in their focus, concentration, and balance.  We practice different poses and then we meditate at the end.  During meditation De’Onna said “Think of a peaceful and serene place.”  When we finished up, Daysia turned to me and said “I think we’re going to have a great day.” We are noticing that starting our day with yoga really helps our focus and peacefulness throughout the day.  I am excited to watch them grow in their yoga skills throughout this year.  Enjoy your three day weekend!

Meet Mrs. Williams!

Starting off by stretching and warming up our muscles.

Practicing our deep yoga breaths with cotton balls.

Paiton practices yoga breathing.

How far will your cotton ball go when you take a deep breath?

Meditation. . . thinking of ways to have a peaceful day!

Yesterday during math, we starts exploring the hundred chart. We examined it together, looking for patterns. Students had some wonderful noticings, especially about the columns that ended in zero and five because this is a way we commonly count.

Today, we worked as a team to create a “life-sized” ten frame on the floor of our classroom! This will allow students to be in the middle of the ten frame as they explore and give us a place where we can go to learn number patterns together. At first, we counted 1-20, but then a student suggested we count by 10s to get to 100. While this left us with an interesting looking work in progress, I am happy that the children are beginning to see patterns with the chart!

We will finish the hundred chart tomorrow, then learn a new game that we can play on it!

Today we did partner reading after our independent reading portion of readers workshop was finished. It was so wonderful to watch the children take turns reading their books to their partner. Their pride for their reading was evident as they read and read and I had to stop them from sharing their work.

We will be doing partner reading here and there as it helps children listen in a more intimate setting.

Today in studio the children worked with wire which is perfect because next week we are going to work on having the children make their gifts out of wire so that we can display them. They were very proud of their work when they entered the room so that was fun to see!

Melina enjoying her cupcake

In our classroom, we celebrate our birthdays by making cupcakes for the class.  We bake them at the end of the month and any student who had a birthday is welcomed to help.  This month, Maxwell and Kayla had a chance to make cupcakes to celebrate.  Here are a few pictures from this afternoon’s fun.

Wyatt is enjoying his cupcake.

Townes is really enjoying his cupcake.