IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today when we came back from yoga, some friends from Miss Bowers class were in our room waiting for us. They are doing a project on teeth right now so they did a survey with our class to see how many friends have lost between 0-10 teeth. Our friends did such a nice job listening to Miss Bowers’ friends and participating in the survey, and they were so excited to share how many teeth they each have lost!

I have been really impressed the last few days watching friends with their story workshop books. There are so many children that have really embraced working on drafts of their books instead of doing it once and being done. The idea behind the drafts is that children are looking critically at their work and are editing and revising to make a high quality piece of work. It is so thrilling to see the children be so invested in their work!!

This week, we have been practicing collecting data and displaying it in various ways. We made a bar graph that showed how many students have lost a specific number of teeth. Each child was so engaged by this activity that we decided to try surveying other classes to collect information that we could graph.

Together, we created a data collection sheet to take to each class we visited so we knew exactly what to ask and could organize our findings! Today, we went in groups of four with a Butler teacher to each class room to ask these students about their teeth. We were very brave as we spoke in front of so many new faces and they were wonderful listeners!

Tomorrow, we will explore other ways to display this information visually to compare the number of teeth that have been lost in each room!

Today, we continued our study of teeth and the mouth by making a healthy snack that looked like a mouth! We used apples, honey sticks, and marshmallows to create this smile and students loved experimenting with different teeth formations and pulling their marshmallow teeth like a real dentist! What a great way to reinforce the ideas we have been studying, while eating something new to us!

Christian’s smile

One friend constructing their smile

Nathan replacing his own teeth with marshmallows

Last week, some of the students were wondering if our colored water from painting with watercolors would change the temperature of the water.  Today I asked the students: Does color affect temperature? Many of our friends explored the water before we added food coloring.   They recorded the temperature of the water in their science notebooks.  The conversations between peers included showing each other the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit and challenging each others’ thoughts on what temperature the water was.  In morning meeting everyone used their science notebooks and we discussed theories about how the food coloring would affect the water’s temperature.  Many students agreed that it depended on the temperature of the food coloring while some thought certain colors would change the temperature more than other colors.  We explored the food dye and realized at the end that we need to come up with some agreements for our science explorations.  Some ideas that the students have already include taking care of the science tools and taking turns with the materials and being careful with the exploration.  For example, students realized putting our hands in the water may change the temperature.  We will continue to explore the idea of science agreements this week!

I loved being able to see how deep friends were thinking about their math today! Friends were making connections, feeling confident, and working on their math pocket. I do not know if I have shared information about the math pockets with you, but the math pockets are something the children can work on once they have completed their notebooks. The things inside their math pockets are filling in hundred charts with missing numbers, ordering numbers 1-20, tracing numbers, etc. Whatever they need in terms of number work, we give them. The children really enjoy working on this because it is something that we do not get to do often because they usually are still working on their notebooks when math workshop is finished. Anywho…just wanted to share how proud I am of their thinking!