IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Thursday morning, we had another note from Sam and mouse! He asked us to build a city for him and his family with all of the things a regular city would have. This led us to make a list of building we knew that helped people in our community (beauty shop, school, library, museum, school, houses, etc)

Later on the in the day, we chose which areas of the city we would prefer to work on. Some friends are working with partners, some are working on their own. We talked about the idea of planning out our buildings before we just build, so we practiced thoughtfully drawing our buildings and labeling which shapes we would be needing in the building phase.

Tags: collaboration, geometry, problem solving, project

We are coming to an end of our author study that we started last semester!  Over the past weeks the kids have wrote, critiqued, and revised (multiple drafts) their stories that were supposed to have similarities to the author they were studying.  We are now to the publishing phase!  Today, five of our students were able to publish their books.  Check out the covers below.  I know the kids are very excited about this.  I promised them we will be able to send them home in a few weeks after our classroom community is able to share and look through them!

Wyatt and Ruth’s books

William, Andrew, and Tylisha’s books.

We have had two great days getting back into our routines at school! We are very excited to have a student teacher from Butler with us this semester.  Miss Crume has been getting to know the friends in our room and everyone has loved showing her what we do each day.  She has also been sharing some of her favorite books with us each day during closing meeting!

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!

This week in Story Workshop, we are learning about the concept of memories. Today, we read the Mo Willems classic, Knuffle Bunny, about a little girl about losing her favorite bunny toy. We shared memories of times we had lost things as well and decided to put them down on paper! We are talking about the concept of how a memory is something that has really happened and it took place in the past. We will continue to delve into this concept this week!

We also have several new materials in our math boxes. Yesterday, friends were introduced to number puzzles- puzzles that need to be assembled to match a hundreds or two hundreds chart. The kids love doing them. We are also working on building numbers with base ten blocks and checking ourselves by re-counting the number.

Tags: story workshop, writing