IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Welcome back from Winter Break! Hope everyone had a wonderful two weeks of rest and family fun!

This first week back to school we are talking about thinking about our reading, writing stories about memories, and, without a doubt, the workshop kids have been most excited about these past two days…MOUSE TOWN!

In math workshop, we are entering into a study of shapes. When meeting together as a grade level team back in December, all of us K/1 teachers decided that we wanted an interactive, project focused, authentic study of two and three dimensional shapes. With that in mind, us teachers decided to invite our friend Sam (from Daniel Kirk’s Library Mouse) who lives in the school library to join us. On Monday, students received a letter from Sam letting them know that he loves living in the library at our school, but his family is coming to stay with him and he thinks he’ll need more space. He asked each class to build him a home to live in. The kids were ecstatic! I don’t think I’ve seen them more excited about anything this year!

Sam let us know that our class could build his house in a room upstairs. We went to visit the room yesterday and found a bunch of boxes. We spent the rest of our math workshop dreaming of ideas for Sam’s house. Geneva wanted to know how many mice were coming to stay with Sam, so that she could make pillows and blankets for each of them. So we wrote Sam back and asked how many people were coming.

Today, we found a second letter from Sam. He let us know that he has 18 family members. Because of the size of his family, Sam was worried that one home might not be large enough. He asked if we could build more of a community for him and his family. This got all of our brains going again, and students decided that they wanted to build Mouse Town, complete with a Chucky Cheese, restaurant, doctors office, pool, hotel, and more. I shared with everyone that building a whole town would take a lot of planning, and that it would be good for us to know what materials we were working with, so we went back up to our Mouse Town room. We spent a couple minutes talking about different three dimensional shapes. Then each student got to select one of our boxes and sort it into which shape it belonged with (cube, rectangular prism, cylinder, pyramid). At the end of our sorting, student noticed that every box we have so far, is a rectangular prism. We then took some time to talk about what other materials we might need.

Chloe picks up a rectangular prism box and sorts it.

The kids agreed that they would like to have some boxes that are different shapes. If you have any containers that are cubes, cylinders, or pyramids at home, and you don’t mind parting with them, please send them in. We would love to have them!

Here is our real life shape graph at the end of our sorting. Rectangular prisms won!

We are excited about the responsibility of building Mouse Town for Sam and his family! I’ll be sure to keep you up to date on all of our mouse themed shape learning!

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