IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

We have been taking care of the chickens this week.  So far we have collected one egg.  Today, we fed the chickens wheat grass that Mrs. Argus’s class grew for them.  We have also been bringing the fruits and vegetables from lunch out to the compost.  The students had a great discussion with Miss Crume about how the compost works.  Many of them have a good understanding of why we are composting and how it will help our garden!

When Mrs. Williams is not here on Mondays and Tuesdays we do Yoga in our classroom before we start our day.  Usually this is a little more difficult than doing yoga in Mrs. Williams’ room where everyone has their own space and a mat.  Today, the students did such a great job in our classroom that we were able to work in partners.  I was really proud of the students’ cooperation and determination with their partner.  Check out some of the great poses that happened today!

Reader’s Workshop: We started talking about finding the main idea while reading informational text.

Word Study: Students are engaged in making words, hunting for short and long vowels, and sight word games.

Story Workshop: We’re continuing to work on conventions, specifically focusing on punctuation and complete sentences this week.

Math Workshop: Miss Crume introduced a new problem type today: “Miss Cegielski had 15 cupcakes.  Miss Crume gave her some more. Now she had 20.  How many cupcakes did Miss Crume give Miss Cegielski?” The students had very creative strategies to solve this problem.

Chickens: We are taking care of the chickens this week.  We did not have any eggs today!

This morning during Morning Meeting we revisited the idea of Bug Statements and solving problems with friends.  We wanted to show Miss Crume what a Bug Statement was and why they are so important in our classroom.  We had a really powerful discussion and I wanted to share a few of the comments from our friends.

DeOnna: “As you grow up you won’t have a teacher with you to help you solve your problems.  If you don’t learn now you’re never going to learn when you grow up.”

Emily: “It’s better to do a bug statement first instead of telling a teacher because you need to figure out your own problems.”

David: “If you have a problem and you already solved it you don’t keep it in your mind because that will get you more in trouble.  You have to let it go.”

In Story Workshop the students were given a story without punctuation.  Martavious shouted out immediately, “The punctuation took a vacation!”  The children had fun working together to put the punctuation back in the story.  This also really helped me see where they are with their understanding of punctuation.  In Math Workshop, we learned +10 -10 Bingo.  This game uses a hundreds board and practices adding and subtracting ten.

During Reader’s Workshop we have moved from studying the text features in informational books such as Table of Contents, Glossary, Caption, and Index to using those features to help us answer questions.  This week the students have a job to do using an informational book about weather.  Each student has three questions and they have to read to find out the answers.  The students have been really thoughtful about their work.  They have been reading their book and then using the new information to help them.  They have also been answering the questions in complete sentences with capital letters and punctuation.  Today I met with Emily and she was stuck on one of her questions.  I asked her to tell me her thinking and she said “Well I started off by looking at the Table of Contents.  Then I found the page that said Temperature and knew that it would probably give me the answer on that page.”  After using the Table of Contents she was able to answer her question.  I’m excited that now the students not only know what the text features are, but they are able to use them to help them while they read!