IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

On Monday, December 3^rd, the Block A students shared their final Teacher Research Projects. The teacher research project was a hands-on way for the Block A students to experience classroom life.  Butler professors, Lab School faculty, friends, and family were all invited to attend this event. This event was the culmination of a semester’s work of research. Each student had the opportunity to showcase his/her accomplishments from the semester. We spent ten weeks in the classrooms collecting data and observing our students to try to answer our questions.

Throughout the course of the semester, we had to complete a variety of tasks as teachers in the classroom. These included: read alouds, conferencing, small group instruction, and a math/literature lesson. When we first started administering these tasks, questions started to form. Each Block A student came up with a different and thought-provoking question. These questions were unique to individual classrooms and focused on our own educational philosophies.

A lot of time and effort was put into the Teacher Research Projects, and the end results really showed it. We are very proud of our fellow classmates and friends. These projects were completed with professionalism and presented with confidence. We can not wait to see what Block B has in store!

Written by: Kara Saks, Sam Karmia, and Sara McDonald

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

On Monday, November 12 the Block A students took part in a mini-workshop that focused on classroom environment. Mr. Nunn, Ms. Fogler and Bob Price led the workshop and it was highly successful! We formed groups and completed brain mapping activities to express our thoughts and questions toward the idea of environment as the third teacher. We also engaged in a “field trip” to the PreSchool room! Ms. Fogler wanted to show off the work her students had been doing with food coloring, water and plastic bottles. We were invited to explore the provocation they had set up in the hallway. Our class later found out that the PreSchoolers spend most of their time investigating how the bottles full of water respond to sunlight, but most of us found it more interesting to smell and shake them. How intellectual of us, right?
After the field trip we hiked back down to our classroom to play around with the idea of furniture as a part of the environment. Mr. Price arranged the chairs in many different ways and asked us to really think about what each set up allowed in terms of classroom communication and openness. From there we concluded our workshop by asking any lingering questions and discussing how we might implement this into our practicum classrooms.

Written by: Rachel Head, Mollie Bates and Margaret Hurt