IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today was such a productive day!  The kids noticed that we had a new agenda on our board today so they were excited to see that (nothing changed except we added yoga, daily news, and spelling work to it).  🙂

We started spelling work today.  During this time, the children are reading their library books.  As they are reading their books, I am calling a group over at a time (3-5 children) to work on 5 spelling words.  It is a short process-5 minutes tops.  Each day we will work on the same five spelling words, but we will look at/work on different things with those words.  Then on Friday, we will add them to our individual word wall book as well as the word wall.  The children were SO enthusiastic about this-some even saying, “I love spelling!  I do not want to stop!”

The five words this week are:  “and”, “the”, “we”, “my”, and “me”.  Feel free to work on these at home.

Today many of the children were asking if we were going to have another pajama party.  I told them that we needed or could earn another party by continuing to make those great choices we have been making.  So, after some discussion about how many points we needed to earn (some said twenty even though that was lower than our original 25 point goal) we came up that we needed to earn 35 points.

Then we discussed what we are going to do for our party.  There were ideas like a disco party, a party where we dress up like famous people, a game party, a cake and ice cream party, and a fancy dress party.  The votes were tabulated and it was between the fancy dress party and game party.  The fancy dress party won!  Now, some of our friends were not so happy of this final vote, but we talked about how at least everyone got a vote and maybe next time their vote will win the party (I have not told them yet, but there will be some games at this fancy dress party so I think the friends that were not happy will be excited about that).

One other exciting part of our day was when I introduced the Doubles Rap (you can search Doubles Rap (I Can Add Doubles) on You Tube to see it).  We have been talking about doubles (1+1, 2+2, etc.) in Math Workshop so finding this rap was just perfect timing!  The children caught on so quickly to the song that by end of the day they were singing all of the words!  I was impressed, and they said, “Can we listen to it again?”

Hope you all had a nice break and welcome back!

What a fun day we had today!  The kiddos LOVED wearing their pajamas to school (as did I).  It was such a treat for us to wear our pajamas to school.  Today we saw a demonstration by Andre (I believe to be 10 years old) who has been in the news recently (newspaper, Anderson Coopers show, etc.) with his stick bombs that he makes out of popsicle sticks.  His family is a perspective family who came to our open house last week.  Andre has been making these stick bombs (it is a bunch of popsicle sticks woven together, and then after you have however many you want you can set it off, and they fly up in the air.  They remind me of dominoes).  Well, he came in today to show his work since Mrs. Grotjan has been doing it with all of the students this week.  They were in awe of Andre and LOVED watching it go off.  If you go to YouTube and put in “stick bombs” you can see videos of them.  Very cool!

We had a blast watching Toy Story 3 and eating popcorn!  I hope that you all have a great Thanksgiving Break!

We made some puppets today that Mekhi's family brought in. Here's Isaac's!

Enjoying the movie!

Our "Go Puppets!" cheer before we peformed for you!

Look how great our class looks in their pajamas!

I cannot begin to tell you how much tonight meant to me and the kids!  We are so thankful to you all for supporting us!   Your claps, laughter, hugs, and voices really helped boost the children’s performances even more!  I was SO proud of their performances.  I felt that each one was special and memorable so thank you for being there!

I hope that you all enjoyed it!  If you have any good pictures or video, let me know so I can maybe get a copy!

Thanks again, and we are looking forward to wearing pajamas tomorrow to school!

Today, the buzz was all about how the children could say, “Tomorrow is our puppet show!”  They kept saying it throughout the day with such excitement and enthusiasm.

Today we performed our shows for the preschoolers!  They were the first audience (other than each other) to watch our shows, and they did such a great job watching and enjoying the shows!  Afterwards, it was a challenge to keep the class on the ground because they were floating with such excitement.  I cannot begin to tell you how proud they were of themselves.   Wait until tomorrow night!

Our preschool friends being a attentive audience.

So, I forgot to mention two little stories that have happened the last two days.  Yesterday, when we started reading during our independent reading time, everyone was so excited to read their new books in their book bags.  I went to work with Saa, and he said, “I can’t read chapter books!”  I said, “Sure you can.  Let me help you.”  As he read the words on the page, he started to smile.  I asked him why he was smiling, and he said, “I can read chapter books.”  I was so proud of him during that moment!

Today, when we were having snack in our community circle, Sydney started spelling something with sign language.  I asked her what she spelled, and she said, “I spelled ‘I love all of my friends.'”  Ahhh….