IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today, we asked the kids, “Would you like to be a part of the recycling team?”  Over half of our class responded yes!  Last year, as a school we all recycled paper weekly and dumped it into our paper retriever outside in our parking lot.  A lot of the kids have been asking about it again this year and we are finally starting to collect again!  This week, friends from both 1-2 classes will be giving speeches to the rest of the school to talk about how we recycle and how we can do it at school.  Check back later this week or next week to see how this goes!  I know the kids are excited once again to help our planet!

We have started doing a monthly writing prompt to help expose the children to different purposes for writing.  Last month was the first time we did this and this type of thinking and writing was very challenging.  Today we completed our second prompt.  Before the children had time to write I passed back their work from the previous time and had them read it again.  Then we had a discussion about ways that we could have made our writing better.  They came up with a lot of great ideas such as more description, neater writing, spelling, adding more words, and putting spaces between words.  We also talked about using these ideas each week on the writing section of the homework.  These discussions will continue as we start to write drafts and edit our stories for the author’s study.

We had another fun filled day! In math we have been exploring place value by building and breaking apart numbers with base ten blocks.  Today we learned a new math game with a deck of cards.  Using the cards two through nine the students flip two cards over and build a number.  The student with the bigger number gets to keep all the cards! We also visited the chickens for the last time today.  We collected 12 eggs total and really enjoyed taking care of them this week.  Daysia, Cameron, and Isabella made cupcakes for us to celebrate their November birthdays!

All Cooped Up: Since the spring, the Butler Lab School 60 has been engaging their students with a chicken coop! The chickens are laying eggs in the chicken coop and the students have opportunities to observe and watch.  The classes alternate week by week and each get to feed and give water to the chickens.  This week Miss Cegielski’s class fed the chickens and found one egg on Wednesday.

Lately Miss Cegielski’s students have shown interest in Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery in the past.  Miss Cegielski has been displaying books and asking the students questions which has led to incredible conversation in the class! The students are incredibly interested about this topic and have treated the issue very respectfully.

-Carly Plumlee

Update from the Butler classroom: Outside of the classroom, we have been working hard on completing our Teacher Research Reports.  Throughout the entire semester, some of our work has been centered around a question we came up with at the start of the semester.  As we have compiled data and implemented interventions with the children, we have accumulated loads of work to help us with our findings.  We are currently in the process of putting all of this data in to one place, the Teacher Research Binder.  In this will include our question, context (data about the school, classroom, focal child), information on our question, our interventions (work completed with focal child), findings, and conclusions.  While completing this report and looking back at the past few months, it has been extremely enlightening, and has made the entire semester of work seem extremely worthwhile.  It has been a joy to work with the kids at the Lab School, and we have learned as much from the kids as they have from us.

-Bo Davidson

Dreams Come True: I (Maggie) am placed in the preschool classroom at School 60, also known as St. Mary’s.  My favorite thing about St. Mary’s is that the students direct their own learning and the teachers administer it.  One way I can example this was when Mae, a three year old, came into class talking about a dream she had the night before. She said that she woke up in the middle of the night because she was painting leaves in her dream.  She was fascinated by this and could not stop talking about this. Ms. Fogler, the head teacher, asked Mae if she would like to paint leaves and other parts of nature in class. Of course, Mae and all the other students were more than excited for this activity! They all went outside and picked up leaves, sticks, branches, etc. and then painted them in the classroom.  This is a perfect example of how students direct the classroom, but the teacher administers it.  It is the teacher’s job to find things that the students are interested and put them in a project.

-Maggie Harbison

I can’t believe that it is almost December, but it is so exciting to notice the areas that we have grown throughout this year.  Our class has progressed so much in our yoga practice this year.  Mrs. Williams has been continuing to challenge them with harder routines, more complicated poses, and longer meditation.  At the beginning of the year the students were meditating for around two minutes.  Now they can meditate anywhere between six to eight minutes.  It takes a great deal of concentration to stay still and quiet for this amount of time.  I’m also able to notice how this is impacting them throughout our day.  I can truly see them growing in the areas of self control and focus during our academic work times.  Mrs. Williams and I are both very proud!