IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Over the past few weeks I have had a few questions about sharing.  Many parents are curious if they can send their child’s favorite toys to school.  The answer is YES!  Each morning, during morning meeting, 4 or 5 friends get the opportunity to share something from home, a piece of work, or an event that happened in their life.  We use this as a part of our community building in our classroom.  In addition, I think it is important to honor all parts of a child’s life.  Toys and items from home are a big part of that!  Please do not be worried that it will become a distraction.  The kids now know that it goes back in their book bags after our morning meeting.  It is now just part of our routine. 🙂  SO….if they have something they want to bring in and as a parent, you are ok with it, send it in!

We are well into the swing of things with our Recycling Project!  Before break we had come up with lots of questions about recycling.  So far we have been reading TONS of books on recycling.  In addition, the kids have decided that they want to start a recycling program at our school.  We are starting in our classroom to try and work it out.  In the upcoming weeks our hope is to finalize our school wide plan and bring an expert in to talk to us.  There might even be a field trip in the works to visit a recycling plant!

Today a few students had a chance to reuse some of our recycled materials.  They made art creations out of things that our class had already recycled.

J'Nayla and Tylisha worked together to build a bird house out of our recycled materials.

Wyatt and Reid worked together to build a bird nest out of our recycled materials.

Reid built a bird bath and Harper built a mailbox out of our recycled materials.

We had an exciting afternoon at school today.  A special visitor came to us and talked about bullying.  Ronald McDonald!!  Mr. McDonald did a magic act and had a short game to talk about how to deal with bullies.  The kids loved the time with him.  It was constant laughter and from my perspective a great way to hear about bullying!

Kristien & Teramondis are reading from their book bags with Mr. Ward.

It was a very exciting day back!   We started the day knowing that there would be a surprise in Reader’s Workshop.  (I had put this in our morning message so there was excitement from 9:00 on.)  As we are now into the swing of things, the kids are reading books that are high interest AND books that are at their level.  To make sure each child gets what they need we have introduced the idea of book bags into Reader’s Workshop.  It was the big surprise of the morning!  The kids were very excited as each one of them got a gallon ziploc bag full of books that were just for them.  How special is that?!  The bags have about 6 books in them and the books will be changed weekly.  In addition, the bags will actually change into canvas bags in a few weeks.  The kids are going to have the opportunity to decorate a piece of fabric and we will then sew it on their bags to personalize them.  We will start this tomorrow. 

Kaylee and David picked Cover All as their math game!

 

BreAnna and Max picked Go Forward, Move Back as their math game!

As if one surprise is not enough, we had another in Math Workshop!  Over the past few weeks we have been playing different math games to work on our number sense.  Well today instead of me picking the game, the kids had an option of 5 different ones we have played in the past!  They were so excited to choose their own I got CHEERS when they found out what was going to happen.

As with all of the areas, the kids are really getting into Math Workshop.  We did not have Math Workshop earlier this week because of our recycling project work and I had many disappointed friends.  I got a lot of sad faces over it.  I can honestly say that this is one of my favorite parts of the day.  It is great to see the kids engaged in their math notebooks and working together with others as they play a math game.  Today, as the kids solved their math problem, I took a few pictures so you can see them at work!  Our math time typically goes something like this: we read the problem in our journal together and then they are sent off to work as we float around to help and assist.  After the work time we share our findings and talk about the different way people solved their problems.  Finally, we end this block of time with some type of math game.  For example, we have been talking about number lines this week so we revisited a game called “Bunny Hop” to see how a number line can be used in life. 

BreAnna is hard at work in her journal!

 

Max and Kaylee are working on their journals as they relax on the carpet.

 

Selah and Sophia are working together to solve their problems!