IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Exciting Mouse Town things have continued to happen over the past week!

Last week, after finishing our drawings, we graphed our buildings to scale.

On Monday, we used our graphed drawings to build models of our buildings.

Seth and Madeline work on the model of their conjoined doctor’s and dentist’s office.

Faith and Aaliyah work on the model of their hotel for Mouse Town.

Then, yesterday, we had a special guest architect come and speak to us about the process of designing and constructing buildings. Olivia’s dad, Mr. Eggink, is an architect in Indianapolis. He showed us a model of his home that he designed and pictures of a building his company designed in Indy.

Mr. Eggink hold up the model of his home so that we can look at it from a bird’s eye view.

Mr. Eggink shows the class a computer generated picture of a building his company designed in Indy.

After listening to Mr. Eggink, students noticed that his buildings had door and windows, and our do not. Because of this, we went and added doors and windows during our math workshop yesterday. Today, we will work on the interior of our buildings. Throughout the rest of the week, we will finish our interiors and begin decorating the exterior parts of our buildings and then assembling the town.

Jaeda shows us her mall, complete with windows and doors.

The kids’ excitement continues as we enter each different phase of this process. We can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s finished!

During Reader’s Workshop we have been focusing on informational text features such as headings, table of contents, glossary and pictures with captions.  Today we practiced writing captions for pictures using pictures of ourselves in action.  The students enjoyed connecting with a partner to come up with a caption.  In Story Workshop our writers have been working hard to publish their stories from their author’s study.  A few friends have finished completely and are waiting to bind their books.  I have been impressed with the attention to detail and stamina throughout this project.  We have been working hard on this for a long time and their dedication truly shows in their beautiful work!

Tonight’s Family Art Night was a great success!  Here are a few pictures from the watercolor section of the night.

Just a reminder: Family Night is tomorrow night, January 15th from 6-7pm at the school.  We will be creating a few permanent art pieces for our building.  Come prepared to have fun!

This morning, Bea brought in something quite interesting- a pomegranate! Many friends had never tried one and were excited to taste the juicy seeds. After tasting, we noticed how many extra seeds were left inside. Bea immediately had an idea- “We need to put them in our grow lab!” All of our friends agreed. We planted three separate containers several pomegranate seeds in each. This led us to a conversation we had last week, about planting other things. Last week, Tajanaye had a wonderful suggestion- to plant seeds and grow seed starters for a special sale and to raise money for our garden. We revisited this conversation after planting the pomegranate seeds, and Tajanaye remarked, “We can sell the seeds and people can give them to grandmas who are sick or people can hang them on their porch.”

Regan added, “If people have a family member that doesn’t have any food, we can give it to them and them can keep it.”

“If someone was sick like your brother or sister you could give it to them as a present.” Bea

Makenzi added, “It would be so kind. So kind. I would like to have a selling party, after our author celebration. Maybe we can put a lot of water to them and they will grow.”

This being said, we decided we would plant an entire package of carrot seeds in Keurig cups in our grow lab and get them started for our sale. Lucas brought up that he believed using these K cups was recycling.

“I think its recycling. I think I saw a book at Mrs. Clark’s class about rethink, reduce, recycle.” Lucas

“I was in Mrs. Clark’s class last year! We made up a song for recycling. It means you reuse, rethink and use it for something else instead of storing it in the trash.” BreAnna

These are such powerful connections for the kids to make. I am excited for exploring other green ways to enhance our garden this year.

We had another great day of building our mouse city, as well. The kids really worked as team to share supplies and negotiate tasks to get done for their buildings and stick to their plans.

Tags: collaboration, garden, geometry, problem solving, recycling, responsible