IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today, we introduced two games to work with measuring.  The first game the children took pages that had squiggly lines on them.  Then, the children had to put a piece of yarn on that squiggly line until it matched perfectly.  They then had to guesss how long the yarn is.  After they guessed how long the yarn was, they had to measure it with their ruler and see if their prediction was correct.

The second game the children had 4 cars labeled A,B,C,D.  The children let each car go down an incline and they placed a peiece of tape where the car stopped.  Then they measured from the bottom of the incline to the front of each car to see which car went the farthest.

Both games were such a hit!  When we were going around the circle talking about how the games went, these were the words that were shared:  Joe-“INCREDIBLE!”, Maggie-“AWESOME!”, Danielle-“GREAT!”And tomorrow we are going to play them again.

We’ve been exploring measurement this week!

We began by reading a book called How Big is a Foot? by Rolf Myller. In the book, a king orders a bed be made for the queen. He says it should be six feet long and three feet wide, according to the size of his big king foot. When the much small apprentice uses his much smaller apprentice feet to build the bed, they run into some trouble. We used this book to launch the question, how big is a foot?

Students traced their own foot, cut it out and used it to measure things around the room.

The next day, we looked at our results and found that we all got different answers. Chloe concluded, much like the story we read, that our measurements were different because we all had different size feet. Olivia then said we needed to measure everything again, this time having everyone use something that is the same size. Finally, Aaliyah shared that she new rulers were all the same size, a foot, and we could use them.

Jace used his paper foot to measure our mailboxes.

After a brief lesson in how to appropriately use a ruler, we remeasured all the items in our room. We looked at our results again and found that our answers were much more similar when we used rulers instead of our own feet.

Seth enters his findings into a measurement chart.

Today, we began measuring with inches instead of feet. Each student was given a piece of string. They had to find two things that were the same length as their string, two items that were shorter than the string, and two items that were longer. For the shorter and longer items, students also had to measure their item to see how many inches long it was.

Next week we will begin using our math journals again to solve story problems with measurement.

For a glimpse inside readers workshop and story workshop…

We have been learning about different features of informational text this week. We have talked about tables of contents, glossaries, indexes, title and subtitles, captions, charts, and bold words. If you happen to be reading a non-fiction/informational text with your child soon, see if you can find any of those key features.

In story workshop, we have been talking about adding details to our writing. Specifically, we have talked about color details, number details, name details, and size details. We will continue to talk about texture and visual details next week.

This afternoon we revisited the classroom agreement “Take Care of our Friends.”  Earlier in the year we did an activity where we folded up “LeBron” a friend drawn on a piece of paper every time we said something unkind to him.  Then we tried to fix him by saying kind words and unfolding him.  Today we did a similar activity to encourage the students to think about their words before they speak.

We first thought about something hurtful that someone had done to us.  We went around the circle and shared something that had hurt us.  After sharing we squirted a pump of hand sanitizer in a cup.  When everyone had shared we had a cup full of “mean words and actions.” I then challenged the students to put their mean words back where they came from.  The students tried a few things, but they realized they couldn’t take the words back.  Here’s a bit of our conversation following the activity.

Himiko: “You can’t take something back after you say it.”

Chairo: “You can remember when someone hurts your feelings for a long time.”

Miss Cegielski: “What can we do before we hurt someone’s feelings with our words?”

J’Nayla: “We should think before we speak.”

After our discussion I shared an idea to help the students “THINK” before they speak:

T: Is it true? H: Is it helpful? I: Is it inspiring? N: Is it necessary? K: Is it kind?

I challenged the students to think before they speak and use our THINK chart to help them decide if what they have to say is worth saying or if they should keep it to themselves.  We’ll continue to explore the idea of friendship and building positive relationships in our classroom during our morning meetings!

We have bee communicating with Miss Schmidt’s class at Guion Creek elementary for a few days now and they asked us an exciting question- Would we like to be pen pals? We immediately decided yes, we would love that and emailed them back to let them know. The other day, Miss Schmidt’s class asked us about all the things we like. Yesterday, we created a book called, Things We Like, and each friend wrote a page about what they like. At the end, we asked the question, “What do you like?” We hope they send us a book! We are looking forward to comparing and contrasting our interests with our new friends and continuing to explore diversity. Today, we learned about how we will mail our book, including adding postage, a return address, and a mailing address. When the weather gets better, we will hopefully take walks to the local mailbox to deliver our mail.

Yesterday, we read a story called, Mama Zooms. In the story, there is a mother who is in a wheelchair and she and her son go on pretend adventures in it. This opened up a conversation about people being different and we talked about some of the ways this mom may have been a little bit different from most moms. Then, we talked about how this mom was just like most moms. Some of the kids’ responses were so powerful.

How is this mother just like most mothers? Mrs. Argus

She can still sing a lullaby to her son. Maria

She has a heart. Cariah

She has feelings just like everyone else. Kalaya

She can think like everyone else too, with her brain! J’Den

She can cook dinner for her family still. Dylan

I have to admit, the first few responses brought tears to my eyes. I hope these lessons in diversity and tolerance will stick with the kids for their life. They understand so much already.

Tags: collaboration, community, diversity, friendship, pen pals

Today we introduced the word “landscapes” into our class.  I cannot even tell you how excited the children are to be using the landscapes to guide their play, stories, and imaginations!  It has been fun to see such collaborative thinking and playing.  This has really been such a great provocation to get the children inspired.  Habitats and Animals here we come!

Today we brought out measuring tapes and rulers to measure the same items we measured yesterday with our feet.  The children all agreed on the fact that the rulers and measuring tape are a more efficient way to manner than our traced and cut out feet.

We have some fun games the next couple of days having to do with measuring so we are excited to continue to explore measuring!