IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Hi Parents!

I also wanted to let you know that we have earned our final class rock in our rock jar for united great class behavior! We will be celebrating our hard work by wearing our pajamas to school this Friday, November 30th.

On another note, we are running very low on color construction paper in our studio. If anyone would like to make a construction paper donation, it would be welcomed and thoroughly appreciated!

Thank you,

Mary Ellen Estridge

This week, we have been exploring some fun new concepts in readers and math workshop, as well as diving deeper into our story workshop process!

In readers workshop this week, we are talking about making connections while we read. Monday and Tuesday we talked about text to self connections. These are connections that we make between a book and our own lives. I challenged students to try and make text to self connections during their independent reading. We discussed how these connections can help us remember our stories as well as make our reading more meaningful. Kynden read a book called “Stop, Pot, Stop,” about a child who makes a pop corn with his grandma. She connected this to how sometimes she and her mom make popcorn together at home.

Today, we introduced text to text connections. This is when we connect one book we are reading to another book we’ve read or heard before. Geneva read a library book about ponies today and connected it to another book she has about ponies at home.

In math workshop this week, we have begun exploring multiplication. I have been so excited and impressed to see how naturally the students have taken to this new form of mathematics. Today’s math journal problem read, “We have 3 chickens at our school. If each chicken lays 5 eggs a week, how many eggs will they lay all together?” The kids did great thinking as they solved this problem. Some drew pictures, some worked with manipulatives, and others drew tables and graphs. All in all, students seem to have a great understanding of basic multiplication. Try finding some multiplication problems you could do at home with your kids. For example, “There are four people in our family and we’re each going to eat 5 chicken nuggets for dinner tonight. How many chicken nuggets will we eat all together?”I bet you’ll be impressed!

In story workshop this week, we have been talking about how to be accountable for our story writing process. We have a new tool in our classroom. It is a story cycle poster. Each child has a clothes pin with their name on it. As part of our cleaning up process at the end of story workshop. Students are now expected to clip their name on which part of the story writing process they will be starting at the beginning of the day tomorrow. That way we can make sure we’re not just writing books without planning or planning books with out writing anything. We can constantly be moving forward in the story writing cycle.

Students can clip their name to whichever part of the story writing cycle they will be reading for tomorrow.

Olivia is reaching the end of cycle. She has been working on a book, entitled “The Business Trip” for many days now. After finishing her second draft and receiving a critique from her peers, Olivia began working on her final/published draft. She is excited about going back and making the changes her friends suggested and having a hard cover on her book! We can’t wait until it’s finished!

Olivia sits in the share chair to read her completed second draft to her peers.

I can’t believe that it is almost December, but it is so exciting to notice the areas that we have grown throughout this year.  Our class has progressed so much in our yoga practice this year.  Mrs. Williams has been continuing to challenge them with harder routines, more complicated poses, and longer meditation.  At the beginning of the year the students were meditating for around two minutes.  Now they can meditate anywhere between six to eight minutes.  It takes a great deal of concentration to stay still and quiet for this amount of time.  I’m also able to notice how this is impacting them throughout our day.  I can truly see them growing in the areas of self control and focus during our academic work times.  Mrs. Williams and I are both very proud!

During math workshop this week, we have been studying multiplication! Students have excelled with working through these more difficult mathematical concepts in their journals and with whole group experiences. We learned a new math game that helps strengthen these multiplication skills called fill it up and I think it is our new class favorite! Each child has a partner, aboard, counters, and a die to work with. They role the die and depending on their game board, make groups of 1,2, or 3 that correspond to the number they rolled. Then, they count out the total number and find that number spot on the board. They use a marker to cover that spot. The goal is to cover the most numbers they can! Students worked hard to solve each equation and had wonderful conversations with their partner about the problems along the way!

This is a question Mr. Ward has been asking the kids for the past few days: “Is it a solid, liquid, or gas?”  Each day in morning meeting this week Mr. Ward has presented one of the three states of matter and we have been having short discussions on each of them.  The kids were so interested in the small things we talked about with our Children’s Museum investigation, We decided from that to continue talking about the different types of matter.  The conversations have been fun to hear and see what the kids notice.  We will be continuing with these conversations and explorations in the next few weeks!