IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

What an exciting day! This afternoon, two of our generous parents, Mr. Newbold and Mr. Reiberg, were generous enough to build three, 4×10 garden boxes. The boxes are beautiful and built of rot-resistant cedar. We can’t wait to plant in them on Wednesday. Remember to send your child in clothes they can get dirty for the big planting!

Zek reads our Beautiful Chickens book in ancicipation of our coop.

Jenesis finds a chicken she likes in the Beautiful Chickens book.

This morning, I was greeted by friends shouting things like “CHICKENS!” and “Do they come today?!?” Friends were so anxious to meet our new hens. This afternoon, Andrew Brake from Naptown Chickens brought us our beautiful coop and three, lovely Rhode Island Red hens: Thelma, Louise, and Dottie. We are lucky enough to have this opportunity thanks to Mandy Owens and Carly Swift, Jett and Hutton’s moms and the owners of Just Pop In! Just Pop In! was kind enough to fund this project for our school. This afternoon, each class went outside to learn a little bit about our new friends and how to care for them. The plan is to have each class share the responsibilities weekly. We also talked about some chicken rules we will need to follow to keep Thelma, Louise and Dottie safe as well as ourselves. Because we don’t want to frighten them, we will try our best to talk in a soft voice around the chickens and not touch them. We are so excited to see how much more we are going to learn about our new friends!

The girls! Meet Thelma, Louise, and Dottie.

The coop and the girls.

Maggie checks out the coop.

Tags: and Dottie, chickens, curious, garden, Louise, responsible, Thelma

We had an exciting afternoon today.  After recess, our class got to go meet our school chickens!  The kids were very interested in the chickens and had a lot of questions.  We will all be exploring together as we care for these animals in our school.

Two of our school chickens!

Mr. Andrew Brake, from Naptown Chickens explained the chickens to our class.

After the chickens we celebrated March and April’s birthdays.  Raki and Tyler worked together to make our cupcakes!

All of our friends are happy about the cupcakes!

I apologize for not being an active blogger this week!  Time has gotten away from me!  Over the past five days our kids have been working very hard on our play!  Mark your calendars for MAY 10th!  This is the night we will be performing our play for the families! Here are a few pictures to show the excitement in the room.

Dorothy is our Litterbug in the play. This week she completed her costume!

Wyatt worked on making a model of our set out of clay.

Reid worked very hard on his model of his helmet, a part of his costume.

We can’t wait to show you more on the actual big day!

As you may know, our class is immersed in a garden project. We have been learning about vermicomposting, seed germination and plant development, the benefits of gardening locally, how insects benefit our garden, and are starting to talk about urban farming on a larger scale. Within the next two weeks, we will be assembling some garden boxes for our school and planting some small vegetable plants we have started from seeds. We are so excited for where this project has led us, and the learning opportunities thus far have been incredible. As we get ready to plant, I wanted to ask families if they would be interested in assisting us with the task of starting our garden. Please let us know if you would be able to do any of the following:

donate plants for the school garden

come in and help build the garden boxes depending on the day

come in and help spread soil depending on the day

come in and help plant the beds depending on the day

donate gardening gloves or help find a donor for them

donate gardening tools (hoes, rakes, shovels, or trowels) or help find a donor for them

donate mulch or help find a donor for it

donate a 50 ft hose and spray nozzle or help find a donor for it

Thank you for your support with this project! We hope this garden becomes a part of our school culture and that it teaches responsibility, care for nature, and the importance of sustainability, amongst many other things! Make sure to ask your child about a special announcement that is coming on Thursday afternoon…

Compost bins

Tags: capable, collaboration, family focus, garden, responsible

J'Nayla and CJ are playing the exchange game.

Today we learned a new game in Math Workshop.  We learned the exchange game and the kids loved it!  To play this game all you need is dice, pennies, and nickels.  The kids roll the dice and pick up that many pennies.  Once they have collected 5 pennies they can exchange it for a nickel!  Whoever has the most nickels wins.  I knew they would be excited about learning a new game, but I had no idea how long they would want to keep playing it!  We had one group that after 20 minutes was still wanting more.