IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today, we did all things pumpkin…did pumpkin math by estimating how heavy our pumpkin is, estimating how tall our pumpkin was, and estimating how many seeds we had in the pumpkin.  Throughout the day we accomplished each tas except for talking about how many seeds we have so tomorrow we will send our papers home with how many seeds we had in our pumpkin.  The children LOVED pulling the seeds out of the pumpkin and getting their hands dirty.

It was a fun day today!  Have a fun night tonight!

I will add pictures tonight from our day today!

So, today I hope that your kiddo gave you their invitation to our “Family Night Puppet Shows.”  It is going to be Thursday, November 17th starting at 6pm.  We had a discussion that a night performance would be a more exciting time for our shows because it is not a normal time we are at school, and we think more families could come if we had it at night.  We wrote down the date, time, where it was going to be, and who was presenting the shows as a group. Then, the children wrote and decorated their own invitations.  I was going to keep them over the weekend, but everyone was so excited to give them to you all so I hope you enjoyed receiving them.

I totally forgot to tell you all that on Monday we started doing jobs in our classroom.  We have an electrician (in charge of turning off the lights), a lumberjack (pencil sharpener), horticulturist (plant waterer), mail helper, folder/backpack manager, librarian, custodian, hand sanitizer distributor, and concessions worker.   It was so fun to see the children so engaged and excited to do their job.  One week your child will have a job, and then the next week they will not have a job.  That way we can make sure that each person gets some special job times every other week.

The way we are displaying jobs in our room!

Our friends working on writing their invitations!

Saa's invitation where he added some puppets on the bottom...so clever!

That is the question that I posed to our friends today regarding our puppet project.  And boy, did they come up with quite the list of things we need to do to get ready for our puppet shows.  Some of the items they said were:

paint the stage

add curtains and a background to the stage (one background for each story we are performing)

add ropes to pull the curtains up

make invitations

make three sheeters

make programs

create the seating (semicircle)

and of course practice our shows!

We will get right on that.  🙂 By the way, I am thinking our puppet show grand finale performance will be the week before Thanksgiving break.  I am thinking that Thursday or Friday evening starting at 6pm.

Today was such a beautiful fall day for our study trip Clowes!  The children did such a nice job of listening to the tour guides at Clowes, and they learned and saw so much of Clowes today.  We saw and discussed the “three sheets” posters of the Clowes Hall performances, we had a discussion in the main lobby of Clowes, and then we went into the theater.  In the theater we sat in the chairs and talked about what we saw.  We went on the stage and learned about the shell that was up for the orchestra.  Then we went backstage and saw the behind the scenes stage area.  After we went backstage we had the honor of riding the orchestra pit down to the basement of Clowes, and boy, it was quite the exciting part of our trip.  The children seemed quite excited for this part of the tour!  After we were done riding the pit, we went and had snack in the green room followed by a trip to the dressing room (where the bright bulbs were surrounding the mirrors).  Once we were finished with that part we went outside and did observational drawings of the outside of Clowes.  It was a fun filled and educational trip that I know will help us prepare for our own puppet shows!

I want to give a special thanks to all of the volunteers that were able to make it today!  I hope you all had a good time!

Friends working on their observational drawings of Clowes Hall!

As we were going down in the pit!

As we are walking into the theater!

This is when we first arrived at Clowes...