IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

On Tuesday every student in the class received their very on composition notebook to be used as a shark journal. Today, students had an opportunity to decorate their shark journals, and then during free choice time, a few of our friends decided to do some shark research. They began reading through our collection of shark books and writing down the fact they looked up. Here is some of the things they have learned so far…

Sharks are fish. – Abel

All sharks are predators. They eat other animals. – Abel

Whale sharks are 40 feet long. – Madeline

Great white sharks eat whales. – Madeline

Sharks sense electric fields to help them catch their pray. – Madeline

Megamouth shark means giant yawner. – Olivia

The megaladon was the largest shark. It was probably 65 feet long. – Geneva

I’m excited to see what our research uncovers next week!

In addition to doing shark research, it seems that some of our friends have been taking their new found shark interest home with them. On Wednesday, Ben made a great white shark out of a box and then brought it in to school to share! What shark stories to you have from home?

Ben dresses up in his Great White shark costume!

Today in Math Workshop, we introduced a new game, tic-tac-toe.  The kids had a board with multiple different sums on it.  They had to add numbers together to make the numbers in the boxes.  There was a lot of strategy involved.  The kids could block others from getting a tic-tac-toe!  They really loved playing and we did some number work at the same time!

Today, we had a special guest visitor… a dental student from IU School of Dentistry!  He came to talk to us about what it is like to be in dental school and show him some of his tools!  Students were engaged with what he was saying and truly wanted to know more!  They had wonderful questions to ask him and learned a lot from what he had to say!  Each student had something to contribute to our conversation and were excited to share what they have learned so far.

Moving forward with our project, we have a dentist coming next week to read to us and teach us about dental health and will hopefully be taking a trip to a dentist office very soon!

Tomorrow, we will be representing the number of teeth each child has lost in a graph, so be sure to ask your child about this experience!

At the end of the day today I asked our friends if they had any questions for our special guest tomorrow, Nicole Misencik. Hands raised so quickly and some really fabulous questions were asked:

“How do clouds move?”-Zakeyah
“How does weather change?”-Heaven
“How does “she” know which weather is here?”-Maggie
“What kind of technology does she use?”-Joe
“How does snow come down?”-Isaac
“How does lightning flash?”-Noah
“How does she know what she knows?”-Mrs. Bucher

There were many other questions that were asked as well as many questions that were not asked because we ran out of time. We are going to write out the questions tomorrow so that we can give them to Ms. Misencik tomorrow when she visits!

So fun!

This week, we began learning about the strategy of stretching out the sounds in words to help us read them. To help kids remember this strategy, we created an animal. His name is stretchy the snake. Stretchy has been showing kids how to start at the beginning of the word, make that sound, and then slowly make the sounds of each following letter or group of letters, until you reach end of the word.

Stretchy the Snake

Last week Ready Rooster showed us how to get our mouths ready for the beginning letter or sound in a word (and sneak peek, but promise not to tell your kids! Next week, Chunky Monkey is going to show us how to look for familiar chunks of letters within a word)!

Each child received a small slinky as a tool to help them stretch out the words in their books. They really seem to be getting the idea of it all! See if you child can show you how they stretch out their words at home!

Danielle uses her slinky to stretch out one of the words in her book!