IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

So, today we revisited the conversation we started yesterday regarding how we could help those that were affected by Hurricane Sandy. The children were talking about wanting to make something and then sell it. One friend offered making a wagon or something really big, but then we thought that it might not bring a lot of money if we just have one thing. Jamari then said, “Why don’t we do a puppet show and they have to pay to come!” As soon as those words came out my friends became so excited talking about how some did a puppet show last year and it was so fun! Everyone seemed really excited and interested in what we were going to do. Heaven suggested doing a puppet show about a hurricane since we are talking about hurricanes and weather. We had to get ready to go home, but we will see tomorrow if we want to go that direction with our puppet show or not…SO FUN!

Today, our students from Butler taught during many parts of the day!  Miss Gitskin did a read aloud that introduced another author for our upcoming author study.  She introduced the idea of word choice to the students and we noticed that sometimes authors repeat their words to add emphasis or create a rhythm.  Chairo used some repeating phrases in his story and then he was able to share this with the class at the end of Story Workshop.

During math, each of the Butler students chose a read aloud connected to one of the math concepts we’ve worked on this year.  The students worked in small groups with the Butler friends and listened to their book and then completed a problem connected to it in their math journals.  The students were very engaged and loved hearing stories during math workshop!

This week in our math journals, we have been working to take a big jump of 10 from a single digit number using a hundreds chart. On Monday, I presented students with a journal problem and gave them little instruction. They utilized strategies that we have practiced before, like drawing pictures and using bead strings, but nobody utilized the hundreds charts that were laying out. While students were able to come to the correct answer, their strategies were not efficient.

On Tuesday, we explored the chart together looking at patterns that we noticed. One student brought up the tens place being the same if you look down the column, so we investigated further and realized this happens because each number in a column is ten apart! This knowledge allowed students to solve their journal problem much fast because they took a big jump of ten using the chart.

Tomorrow, we will begin to explore the number line as another math tool to use when solving problems.

Yesterday, we took some to connect our current project with this week’s readers workshop study on perspective.

At the end of the day, after packing up, we all met together on the big rug to read a book about a shark’s food chain. We have read a couple books about food chain’s in general, but this was our first time looking specifically at the food chain of a shark. The book was excellent because it started with plankton, all the way at the very bottom of the food chain and then moved up, all the way to the top with the great white shark! We talked about plankton, mussels, lobsters, octopi, sea lion, and then sharks.

In the book, it stated that the great white shark doesn’t have any real predators that try to eat it. However, one of our students shared that, in some countries, people cut off the fins of sharks. After hearing this, we took some time to consider what a person’s perspective usually is when thinking of sharks. Then we took some time to consider what a shark’s perspective might be of humans, now knowing that some humans are predators of sharks. It was interesting to see the kids take some time to think about the fact that, these huge “dangerous” animals who are often times viewed as scary by humans, might actually be afraid of us.

One of our students has suggested that we build a large food chain of a shark to show other people in our school what a shark eats. My goal is that this study of a sharks food chain will lead to a greater understanding of how one animal impacts other animals and its ecosystem. Eventually, my dream would be for that understanding to transfer over to how each individual in OUR ecosystem (our school/classroom) impacts others!

Last week, we came up with many questions about plants and how they grow. This week, we decided to investigate two of those questions with an experiment.

Question #1- Can plants grow in sand?

Question #2- Can plants grow without soil?

 In our new grow lab, we have three pots with lima beans inside them. We talked about how our first pot is our control group, the regular lima bean in classic potting soil. The second has a seed in sand. The third has a lima bean in a paper towel. We will monitor the growth each day to see what grows, and which grows the strongest/tallest/fastest. We also read a book with Mr. Henderson about the importance of light on plants and Photosynthesis. We learned that leaves are like little kitchens that make food for the plant. Photosynthesis (the cooking of the food) is done by using light. Our grow lab has an artificial light that will be on while we are at school. It will also turn on for a short while during the evening, to give our plants lots of adequate light.

We have also begun talking about weather and the effects it may have on our garden. We wrote a letter to Mrs. Bucher’s class on Monday asking for them to teach us a little bit about weather. Yesterday, several friends came over to our class and brought a new tool to show us- an anemometer. This tool measures wind speed, it also had a thermometer and rain gauge on it.  To learn more about it and how it worked, we took it outside- wow did it move! The wind was so fast the anemometer top spun around and around. We also paid attention to how quickly the temperature dropped from inside to outside. We will continue to observe the weather and talked about its changes in November. We even created a weather graph to start tracking the weather in November!

Tags: capable, garden, project, scientific method