IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today (in preparation of our trip to the Gecko exhibit at the Children’s Museum) we began looking closer at deserts.  We brought in some sand and some fossils that would be in a desert.  The children really loved exploring with the sand!  We also had a really interesting snake x-ray that Alejandra used to help her tell a story of a snake coming into a house!  We will continue to explore deserts this week!

We also opened a dollhouse to play with and oh my-it was so fun to see so many friends playing with it, and such great caretakers we have!

Our friends were really excited to have our new Butler teachers in our class today.  Mr. Webster, Miss Slagel, Miss Merar, and Miss Devers will be in our room every Monday for their practicum.  I was so impressed with how they jumped in, asked questions, and were really engaged with the children and their work!

Today we were so excited to welcome four Block A students from Butler into our classroom: Miss Sofianopoulos, Miss Kampel, Miss Chapman, and Mr. Heeter.  Our Butler friends got to know the students today and the students had a great time showing them the routines and procedures in our room.  They will join us each Monday and we look forward to working with them this semester!

I wish you could have been there today when Miss Boyle and I told the kiddos about the field trip coming up.  They were hanging onto every word I was saying and they were SUPER excited when I told them we were seeing the new Geckos exhibit at the Museum.

We are going to begin studying deserts and geckos coming up on Monday so we are really thrilled for this fun project!

Today, we introduced two games to work with measuring.  The first game the children took pages that had squiggly lines on them.  Then, the children had to put a piece of yarn on that squiggly line until it matched perfectly.  They then had to guesss how long the yarn is.  After they guessed how long the yarn was, they had to measure it with their ruler and see if their prediction was correct.

The second game the children had 4 cars labeled A,B,C,D.  The children let each car go down an incline and they placed a peiece of tape where the car stopped.  Then they measured from the bottom of the incline to the front of each car to see which car went the farthest.

Both games were such a hit!  When we were going around the circle talking about how the games went, these were the words that were shared:  Joe-“INCREDIBLE!”, Maggie-“AWESOME!”, Danielle-“GREAT!”And tomorrow we are going to play them again.

We’ve been exploring measurement this week!

We began by reading a book called How Big is a Foot? by Rolf Myller. In the book, a king orders a bed be made for the queen. He says it should be six feet long and three feet wide, according to the size of his big king foot. When the much small apprentice uses his much smaller apprentice feet to build the bed, they run into some trouble. We used this book to launch the question, how big is a foot?

Students traced their own foot, cut it out and used it to measure things around the room.

The next day, we looked at our results and found that we all got different answers. Chloe concluded, much like the story we read, that our measurements were different because we all had different size feet. Olivia then said we needed to measure everything again, this time having everyone use something that is the same size. Finally, Aaliyah shared that she new rulers were all the same size, a foot, and we could use them.

Jace used his paper foot to measure our mailboxes.

After a brief lesson in how to appropriately use a ruler, we remeasured all the items in our room. We looked at our results again and found that our answers were much more similar when we used rulers instead of our own feet.

Seth enters his findings into a measurement chart.

Today, we began measuring with inches instead of feet. Each student was given a piece of string. They had to find two things that were the same length as their string, two items that were shorter than the string, and two items that were longer. For the shorter and longer items, students also had to measure their item to see how many inches long it was.

Next week we will begin using our math journals again to solve story problems with measurement.

For a glimpse inside readers workshop and story workshop…

We have been learning about different features of informational text this week. We have talked about tables of contents, glossaries, indexes, title and subtitles, captions, charts, and bold words. If you happen to be reading a non-fiction/informational text with your child soon, see if you can find any of those key features.

In story workshop, we have been talking about adding details to our writing. Specifically, we have talked about color details, number details, name details, and size details. We will continue to talk about texture and visual details next week.