IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

In math workshop this week, we are continuing our learning of time. We have gotten pretty adept at telling time to the hour and drawing that time on clocks. We are improving in the area of telling time to the half hour and and writing half hour times on clocks. We have also been doing time story problems in our math notebooks this week. Students are learning different strategies to solve problems such as “Tyrese, Cece, Danielle, and Jace get on the bus at 3:30. They eat dinner four hours later. What time do they eat dinner?” Some students use small clock manipulatives to solve these problems. Others have been thinking about a clock as a round number line and have been making jumps around the numbers in the same way we would jump forwards or backwards on a number line. Both strategies work great for different students.

Chloe solves a time story problem in her math notebook.

Something new we have started, as I’m sure you’ve noticed in the papers your child is bringing home, is writing our morning message together during morning meeting. I was noticing that we all had a need for lesson on letter formation, spacing of words, and concepts of print. Not wanting to take any additional time away from our workshops, I decided to build these lessons into our morning meeting. So now, during morning meeting, I write two sentences on the board, that students are then able to copy. One is always the date and the second is something about our day. During this time, I talk to students about the proper formation of letters, such as which letters go below the line (into the “basement”), which letters go all the way to the top (into the “attic”), and which way tricky letters face (like b, d, s). We also talk about how many sentences we wrote, how many words are in each sentence, how many letters are in different words, and which words have capital letters. Although odd, these are all skills that we try to work on during kindergarten and first grade. As always, it’s exciting to see everyone’s growth. Just a week of writing like this together, and I can already see major improvements!

Aidan circles a capital letter in our morning message.

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