IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Just a reminder: Family Night is tomorrow night, January 15th from 6-7pm at the school.  We will be creating a few permanent art pieces for our building.  Come prepared to have fun!

We have a new website :  60.ips.k12.in.us

Please check it out! There you can find information about our school demographics, our latest parent-teacher organization notes, events that are taking place, and more. We also have a link to this blog. Shortly, we will have a school calendar and lunch calendar available. Currently, we are still having some problems with our blog but we hope to correct those soon. We hope you enjoy the site and can refer friends who may be interested in our school!

Welcome back from Winter Break! Hope everyone had a wonderful two weeks of rest and family fun!

This first week back to school we are talking about thinking about our reading, writing stories about memories, and, without a doubt, the workshop kids have been most excited about these past two days…MOUSE TOWN!

In math workshop, we are entering into a study of shapes. When meeting together as a grade level team back in December, all of us K/1 teachers decided that we wanted an interactive, project focused, authentic study of two and three dimensional shapes. With that in mind, us teachers decided to invite our friend Sam (from Daniel Kirk’s Library Mouse) who lives in the school library to join us. On Monday, students received a letter from Sam letting them know that he loves living in the library at our school, but his family is coming to stay with him and he thinks he’ll need more space. He asked each class to build him a home to live in. The kids were ecstatic! I don’t think I’ve seen them more excited about anything this year!

Sam let us know that our class could build his house in a room upstairs. We went to visit the room yesterday and found a bunch of boxes. We spent the rest of our math workshop dreaming of ideas for Sam’s house. Geneva wanted to know how many mice were coming to stay with Sam, so that she could make pillows and blankets for each of them. So we wrote Sam back and asked how many people were coming.

Today, we found a second letter from Sam. He let us know that he has 18 family members. Because of the size of his family, Sam was worried that one home might not be large enough. He asked if we could build more of a community for him and his family. This got all of our brains going again, and students decided that they wanted to build Mouse Town, complete with a Chucky Cheese, restaurant, doctors office, pool, hotel, and more. I shared with everyone that building a whole town would take a lot of planning, and that it would be good for us to know what materials we were working with, so we went back up to our Mouse Town room. We spent a couple minutes talking about different three dimensional shapes. Then each student got to select one of our boxes and sort it into which shape it belonged with (cube, rectangular prism, cylinder, pyramid). At the end of our sorting, student noticed that every box we have so far, is a rectangular prism. We then took some time to talk about what other materials we might need.

Chloe picks up a rectangular prism box and sorts it.

The kids agreed that they would like to have some boxes that are different shapes. If you have any containers that are cubes, cylinders, or pyramids at home, and you don’t mind parting with them, please send them in. We would love to have them!

Here is our real life shape graph at the end of our sorting. Rectangular prisms won!

We are excited about the responsibility of building Mouse Town for Sam and his family! I’ll be sure to keep you up to date on all of our mouse themed shape learning!

After break, the k-1 team will be starting a unit on geometry. We need your empty boxes, containers, and cans to make this happen! Please send them in with your child on Monday, January 7. Thanks for your help!

For the past two weeks, we have been comparing and contrasting books during readers workshop. We started by comparing and contrasting fairy tales. This week, we have been comparing and contrasting fiction and non-fiction (now called informational texts) books on the same topic. For example, today we read an informational text about T Rex, and we also read “How do Dinosaurs say I Love You?” by Jane Yolen. It’s been great to see the kids think critically about the books they are reading. One of the things we discussing while creating a venn diagram today was that informational texts teach us something and fictional books, although they can teach us a lot, usually have more of a story feel.

At the end of readers workshop today, Tyrese shared a book he had read called “We Go Out.” After Tyrese finished reading the book, I asked the rest of the students if they thought the book was a fiction book or an informational text. One child concluded that because it wasn’t teaching us anything, it must be fictional. Another child concluded that because it had pictures that were taken with a camera, it must be informational.

Tyrese reads “We go out” during readers workshop share time.

I thought this was an interesting perspective on their part! Most informational texts do have pictures taken with a camera, and most fictional books do have illustrations. But is that the case all the time? Or is that the perspective of the students in our class? In an effort to broaden that perspective, I challenged the students to take a paper, clipboard, and pencil to recess and take a survey of what their peers thought. We shared our findings after lunch and realized that we had very mixed responses from other students. So, during math workshop, we talked about how we could conduct a second survey so that our data would be more clear, one way or another. We narrowed what had been four different questions during the recess survey, down to two questions. The questions are…

1. Do fiction books ever have real pictures that you take with a camera?

2. Do informational books (non-fiction) ever have pictures that you draw?

We intend to ask other classes these two questions tomorrow. We also would like to send home surveys for students to give to their families over the weekend. It might even be fun for students to go on a hunt for books in their home that break the norm.

So excited about this inquiry based learning that is taking over readers workshop! Thanks for sharing in our learning with us!