IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Hello hello!  So, today we spoke as a group about where to go next with our project.  Some of the responses were as followed:

“It needs to be bigger (the stage).”-Heaven

“The stage needs to be wider.” -Jonah

“I have a big roll of paper and we can draw it for the background.” -Oliver

“Taller because parents won’t be able to see it well.” -Selam

Overall, the conversation was leading towards us needing to build a stage so that is where we are going!  This afternoon we did observation drawings of the current stage we have now in our room, and then we turned it over and drew a picture of kind of stage we want.  It was very interesting to see what the children desire for their stages.

Anyone out there good with building and with tools?  We might be asking you to help us build the stage sometime soon!

Have a great weekend!

Joseph's drawing of our current puppet stage.

Some friends doing their observational drawings of the puppet stage we currently have in our room.

Today to mix it up we decided to read our reader’s workshop books outside! The children loved being able to go outside to our courtyard and read their books, and as we walked in I had some friends ask if we could do it again tomorrow! We will see how the weather is…:)

Today while the children were in the Studio some of our friends started adding items to their puppets to enhance their features. As a whole they are so excited to be working on their puppets. When Mrs. Grotjan asked who wanted to work on their puppets today, almost every single one of the children put their hand on their hand (showing they wanted to work on their puppet)! That made me so happy to see their excitement and engagement with this topic of puppets.

During Writer’s Workshop today we read A Chair For My Mother. This story is about a family that is saving up coins to buy a comfy chair after they lost their furniture in a fire. One of the pages read that the neighbors and friends helped donate furniture to this family, and Malachi said, “They need to put a pom in their baskets!” I love the idea of filling buckets is spreading now to text that we are reading.

We read this book today because the author wrote this book after the fire actually happened to her family. This brought us into the topic of personal narratives. We will be exploring this idea of personal narratives more in the next week or so.

I tried importing pictures again, but I am having trouble again. I am going to contact someone to help me figure this out! SORRY!

For the past few days we have played a game where I show a ten frame card and the children have to say how many dots it shows (what number it is). At first I went really slow so the children could see the card well, and they did a really good job at telling me how many dots they see and why and how they got to that number. Today, we did the same game, but this time I went really fast, and you know what…they did great! With a smaller version of the ten frame cards, we played high card which the children loved playing. In partners, they each placed a card in front of them. Whoever had the highest card won the hand! The children really loved playing the game and they were getting really good at knowing and seeing how many dots were on the cards.

Today we got to the fourth group to work on making their puppets for their shows. Tomorrow we will start looking at puppet books to see if there is anything else we can do to add or enhance our puppets. They are REALLY enjoy this process! Next up after creating the puppets will be working on the background to our puppet shows.

(I tried posting pictures with this post, but it is not allowing me to do so…sorry!)

Yesterday we started new literacy stations, and the last two days have been great with them!  We are making name graphs with our names.  We have to sort them by first letter, and then if the group gets done with that the children have to sort the names by the last letter of the name.  We are designing posters for our puppet shows.  We are taking a clipboard cruise and writing the words we see in our classroom.  We are seeking out objects out of a brown paper bag and then we are writing the first letter we hear or the whole word.  We are creating sentences by filling in our friends’ names within the sentence.  The last group is a station working with me…:)

The children have done such a nice job on these stations so I am excited to continue to do them each day!

Another exciting thing we did today was yoga!  The children at first were like, “What are we doing Mrs. Bucher”, but then they got into especially when we were doing the Tree Pose.  🙂