IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today was our first day of physical education this year at the Lab School.

This week we celebrated the arrival of our four new Butler teachers!

For any parents who don’t know, we have a very close partnership with Butler University. Students who are in Butler’s College of Education meet at our school for some of their classes. For those classes, they then spend one whole day a week in our classrooms. This is a great opportunity for them to get experience trying different teaching strategies and it is a great opportunity for us to have more educators in the room working with our kids!

On Monday, our four new Butler teachers spent their first day with us. They will be spending most every Monday in the classroom teaching and caring for the kids in our school community. Feel free to say hello and introduce yourself if you’re ever in the room the same time they are. They are all wonderful!

Miss Schaar spent time reading with Spencer on Monday.

Miss Denny built blocks with Aidan and DayTwon.

Miss Winsemann worked with Chloe, Kynden, Olivia, and Geneva during story workshop.

And Miss Orech explored beautiful water color pencils with Jaeda, Ben, Ellie, and Abel.

In other new this week, we have been reviewing some of the animal reading strategies that help us remember how to read tricky words. We have spent time reviewing Ready Rooster, Stretchy Snake, Chunky Monkey, and Flippy Dolphin, all of which are on the reading strategies flyer I sent home this week.

In math workshop, we have been continuing our exploration of measurement within the context of problem solving this week. The kids loved Mouse Town (which is now done and displayed above our cubbies! Check it out next time you are at school), but many of them have expressed an excitement to be solving math problems in our math journals again!
It’s a great day when your students are asking for more math problems to solve.

In writers workshop we have been continuing to talk about details in our writing. It is my hope that conversation about details this week will be good preparation for our dialogue about adjectives and synonyms next week! Stay tuned to hear more!

We’ve been exploring measurement this week!

We began by reading a book called How Big is a Foot? by Rolf Myller. In the book, a king orders a bed be made for the queen. He says it should be six feet long and three feet wide, according to the size of his big king foot. When the much small apprentice uses his much smaller apprentice feet to build the bed, they run into some trouble. We used this book to launch the question, how big is a foot?

Students traced their own foot, cut it out and used it to measure things around the room.

The next day, we looked at our results and found that we all got different answers. Chloe concluded, much like the story we read, that our measurements were different because we all had different size feet. Olivia then said we needed to measure everything again, this time having everyone use something that is the same size. Finally, Aaliyah shared that she new rulers were all the same size, a foot, and we could use them.

Jace used his paper foot to measure our mailboxes.

After a brief lesson in how to appropriately use a ruler, we remeasured all the items in our room. We looked at our results again and found that our answers were much more similar when we used rulers instead of our own feet.

Seth enters his findings into a measurement chart.

Today, we began measuring with inches instead of feet. Each student was given a piece of string. They had to find two things that were the same length as their string, two items that were shorter than the string, and two items that were longer. For the shorter and longer items, students also had to measure their item to see how many inches long it was.

Next week we will begin using our math journals again to solve story problems with measurement.

For a glimpse inside readers workshop and story workshop…

We have been learning about different features of informational text this week. We have talked about tables of contents, glossaries, indexes, title and subtitles, captions, charts, and bold words. If you happen to be reading a non-fiction/informational text with your child soon, see if you can find any of those key features.

In story workshop, we have been talking about adding details to our writing. Specifically, we have talked about color details, number details, name details, and size details. We will continue to talk about texture and visual details next week.

Exciting Mouse Town things have continued to happen over the past week!

Last week, after finishing our drawings, we graphed our buildings to scale.

On Monday, we used our graphed drawings to build models of our buildings.

Seth and Madeline work on the model of their conjoined doctor’s and dentist’s office.

Faith and Aaliyah work on the model of their hotel for Mouse Town.

Then, yesterday, we had a special guest architect come and speak to us about the process of designing and constructing buildings. Olivia’s dad, Mr. Eggink, is an architect in Indianapolis. He showed us a model of his home that he designed and pictures of a building his company designed in Indy.

Mr. Eggink hold up the model of his home so that we can look at it from a bird’s eye view.

Mr. Eggink shows the class a computer generated picture of a building his company designed in Indy.

After listening to Mr. Eggink, students noticed that his buildings had door and windows, and our do not. Because of this, we went and added doors and windows during our math workshop yesterday. Today, we will work on the interior of our buildings. Throughout the rest of the week, we will finish our interiors and begin decorating the exterior parts of our buildings and then assembling the town.

Jaeda shows us her mall, complete with windows and doors.

The kids’ excitement continues as we enter each different phase of this process. We can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s finished!

Tonight’s Family Art Night was a great success!  Here are a few pictures from the watercolor section of the night.