IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

In class today, we started talking about gifts that we bring to our community.  Together, we read the book Ish by Peter Reynolds.  In the story it talks about a little boy and how he drew tons and tons of pictures.  He would draw them and his sister would secretly save them.  One day she showed him the gallery she had created out of the drawings he had made.  With his sister’s help, the boy in the story realized he had a gift of drawing!  As a class we talked about how gifts are important.  We each bring our own gifts that can help others.  Here are a few gifts from our friends.

*Jonah- I bring the gift of playing games.

*Joseph- I being the gift of building.

*Melina- I bring the gift of music.

*Aasha- I bring the gift of creativity.

*David- I bring the gift of drawing.

Last week we introduced Ready Rooster-that is getting our mouths ready to start sounding out a word. Today we introduced Stretchy Snake! Stretchy Snake helps us figure out those hard words. I gave each friend a slinky a.k.a. Stretchy Snake and when they got to a word they did not know they stretched out the slinky which helped them separate the sounds-thus figuring out the actual word. I was so proud of the friends because I looked around and saw many of them using the stretchy snakes to help figure out the words!

One of the new Word Work activities this week is tapping out the sounds of words. Each friend has three lights. I say a word, and then they tap out the sounds. If there are three sounds like c-a-t then they would tap all three lights. If the word is m-e then they would only tap two lights. After the children tapped out the sounds they then tried and spell the words. The children LOVED playing this game and were so sad when it was time to clean up!

With the many weather reports we have had these past couple of weeks, the weather symbols that were first made have deteriorated a little bit so we talked about maybe making some new symbols that might be stronger. Makayla and Noah offered to paint the symbols so we have begun creating those!

This week, it is our responsibility to be chicken and garden stewards! We went outside and to our delight, there were 6 eggs to collect from our girls. After we fed the chickens, we took a look at the garden and noticed all the changes from the beginning of the year. We noticed many of the plants have gone to bolt (have flowered) and are about done producing. We noticed some plants still need to be harvested and may need a little more time (peppers!). We talked about what needs to be done this week to take care of the garden. Some suggestions were:

weeding

pulling out bolted plants

watering

making pesto from basil

We plan to act on this list tomorrow. The garden is such a wonderful space for us. We are so lucky to have it. 🙂

Tags: chickens, curious, garden, responsible

We have been talking a lot about friendship during our Morning Meeting time.  Last week the students decided we should create a book about friendship.  They all worked together to create a page for the book about being a great friend.  Check out some pages from the book below.

Today we also did an activity during Morning Meeting about using kind words.  I drew a person on a piece of paper and first we went around the circle and said something unkind to our person.  Each time we said an unkind word we folded up the paper.  The students noticed that after so many unkind words the person was so small and almost gone.  Then, we went around the circle and said kind things and apologized to the person.  This time we unfolded the paper with each kind word we said.  After the activity, everyone realized that the paper was still all crumpled and it wasn’t the same as before.  We realized that once you say something unkind, even if you apologize it never really goes away.  When I asked the class what this meant they shared some great ideas such as “Think twice before you talk” and “This reminds me to treat others the way I want to be treated.”  This was such a powerful activity and I was really glad to see how much the students learned from it!

We are so excited because next Friday, Nicole Misencik from WTHR is coming into our classroom! She is going to share information about what she does for a living, what the forecast will be for the upcoming weekend, and weather safety tips. I showed a picture of Nicole today to the children and they just loved seeing her.

Today we learned a new math game. This game we used an egg carton with numbers written on the bottom and two pennies. The children had to take turns shaking the egg carton. When they opened the carton, wherever the pennies landed they had to add those two numbers. Te children took turns making equations and solving them and really worked well together!