IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Welcome back!!  We are very excited to be back to school after a week long break.  I just wanted to remind everyone that this THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1st we will be having our Family Math Night from 6:00-7:00 at school.  Come and learn a few of the games the kids have been playing over the past weeks at school.  Each family will leave with a math packet full of games to play together at home.

Today was such a productive day!  The kids noticed that we had a new agenda on our board today so they were excited to see that (nothing changed except we added yoga, daily news, and spelling work to it).  🙂

We started spelling work today.  During this time, the children are reading their library books.  As they are reading their books, I am calling a group over at a time (3-5 children) to work on 5 spelling words.  It is a short process-5 minutes tops.  Each day we will work on the same five spelling words, but we will look at/work on different things with those words.  Then on Friday, we will add them to our individual word wall book as well as the word wall.  The children were SO enthusiastic about this-some even saying, “I love spelling!  I do not want to stop!”

The five words this week are:  “and”, “the”, “we”, “my”, and “me”.  Feel free to work on these at home.

Today many of the children were asking if we were going to have another pajama party.  I told them that we needed or could earn another party by continuing to make those great choices we have been making.  So, after some discussion about how many points we needed to earn (some said twenty even though that was lower than our original 25 point goal) we came up that we needed to earn 35 points.

Then we discussed what we are going to do for our party.  There were ideas like a disco party, a party where we dress up like famous people, a game party, a cake and ice cream party, and a fancy dress party.  The votes were tabulated and it was between the fancy dress party and game party.  The fancy dress party won!  Now, some of our friends were not so happy of this final vote, but we talked about how at least everyone got a vote and maybe next time their vote will win the party (I have not told them yet, but there will be some games at this fancy dress party so I think the friends that were not happy will be excited about that).

One other exciting part of our day was when I introduced the Doubles Rap (you can search Doubles Rap (I Can Add Doubles) on You Tube to see it).  We have been talking about doubles (1+1, 2+2, etc.) in Math Workshop so finding this rap was just perfect timing!  The children caught on so quickly to the song that by end of the day they were singing all of the words!  I was impressed, and they said, “Can we listen to it again?”

Hope you all had a nice break and welcome back!

Lucas and Ruth explore with magnets.

Good evening families! I was certainly happy to be back at school and I think the kids missed being here too! We had an awesome day today. Our friends were excited to discover many new materials in the classroom, including magnets, many more maps, books about places around the world, and cars! We continued our discussion on where our big airplane trip should be and even watched a couple short videos about potential places- Mexico, Antarctica, and China! The kids really enjoyed our new continent song “North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Antarctica and don’t forget Australia!” Ask your child to sing it to you!

We are enjoying learning about the world around us!

What a fun day we had today!  The kiddos LOVED wearing their pajamas to school (as did I).  It was such a treat for us to wear our pajamas to school.  Today we saw a demonstration by Andre (I believe to be 10 years old) who has been in the news recently (newspaper, Anderson Coopers show, etc.) with his stick bombs that he makes out of popsicle sticks.  His family is a perspective family who came to our open house last week.  Andre has been making these stick bombs (it is a bunch of popsicle sticks woven together, and then after you have however many you want you can set it off, and they fly up in the air.  They remind me of dominoes).  Well, he came in today to show his work since Mrs. Grotjan has been doing it with all of the students this week.  They were in awe of Andre and LOVED watching it go off.  If you go to YouTube and put in “stick bombs” you can see videos of them.  Very cool!

We had a blast watching Toy Story 3 and eating popcorn!  I hope that you all have a great Thanksgiving Break!

We made some puppets today that Mekhi's family brought in. Here's Isaac's!

Enjoying the movie!

Our "Go Puppets!" cheer before we peformed for you!

Look how great our class looks in their pajamas!

Leah was our Mystery Reader!

We had a big day today! Our 3rd mystery reader was someone inside the school.  Leah, Sophia’s sister, was our mystery reader.  As always, if you would like to be a mystery reader or know someone in your family who would like to be one please let me know!