IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today was fun because we celebrated Isai, Heaven, and Niall’s birthdays! They baked cupcakes for us and the children were so excited to celebrate them as well as eat cupcakes! It was great to see the children celebrate their friends!

Today I saw Selah’s book she has been working on during Story Workshop. She has been working on this book for a couple of weeks. It is all about what we do at school. One page really struck me because she drew us in a circle eating snack. I absolutely LOVED the detail she included in the picture. I also felt that she captured something we do each day-build community. I wanted to just share this picture because I thought it was beautiful!

Each Friday in Math we have been playing different games to target math skills such as math facts and number sense.  This week the students were able to choose between all of the games we have learned so far.  Students played Number Burglar, Make 10 Go Fish, Ten Frame War, and Addition Tic Tac Toe.  Each pair of students chose two games to play.   I heard many conversations between partners involving deep mathematical thinking.  The students are really improving on the strategies behind the games!

Our science provocations this week have centered around observing and using magnifying glasses.  Many students expressed an interest in working on their observation skills by completing observational drawings.  We decided that we wanted to do observational drawings of a tree.  At the end of the day we spent some time observing the tree and drawing.  The students made detailed observations such as “leaves are already starting to fall” and “there’s a nest in this tree.” We will continue developing our observation skills next week!

Remember that Monday is picture day! Students DO NOT have to wear uniforms. Also Wednesday is our planting day.  Again, students do not have to wear uniforms.  Please send them in clothes that you don’t mind if they get dirty. Have a great weekend!

This week we have been studying a reading strategy called chunking. This helps us identify common letter blends and smaller words within an unknown word. We have used many strategies to explore this decoding method all week. First, we cut apart words written on index cards based on chunks that we found. We used magnetic letters to pull apart words that we were unsure about to see what sight words we could find. We also read a book about a boy named Anthony who realized his name Included the word ant, so he looked for ants every where he went.

Encourage your child to look for common chunks when reading with them at home! This will make attacking unfamiliar words easy and help them feel successful as they read.

This morning, Ms. Simpson gave me four Hedge Apples she found on her way to school. What’s a Hedge Apple, you ask? That’s what we were trying to figure out all day! The odd looking, wrinkly fruits are green and fresh smelling, and come from certain trees located in the Meridian-Kessler neighborhood. We presented them to the kids this morning and asked them, “What is a Hedge Apple?” After a little bit of research and talking to some other adults who knew of the strange fruit, we learned that some people believe Hedge Apples have special powers- particularly keeping away spiders and insects. Friends were then inspired to create their own magic Hedge Apple stories throughout their free time and during Story Workshop. We hope to learn more about these intriguing things Monday!

Tags: curious, garden, inspiration, story telling, story workshop

Last week, I had a conversation with three friends about games.  Raki, Reid, and Tylisha all shared their thoughts on how playing games was fun and cheating was not good.  Today we took this small group conversation and shared it with all of our other friends and asked what they thought about games.  Here are some of their quotes from the conversation.

*Miles- When you are playing with a friend you always should have fun & it’s more likely about fun instead of winning. It’s more important than winning because winning is more like cheating sometimes and having fun is more like following the rules and doing what the rules say.

*Reid- Well, It’s more about having fun because if you win you might brag and bragging is like bullying.  If you brag it’s not nice to the loser who lost the game.

*Townes- It’s kind of what Reid said, if you said, “I won! I won!  You loose!”  The looser won’t be happy because the winner bragged.

*Ruth- When your cheating it’s like lying and lying is like keeping a secret from someone.  Then if you lie a bunch you don’t know where to start telling the truth.

I’m really looking forward to see where this game project takes us.  I can already see that we are going to be talking a lot about being fair and working together. 🙂