IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today during yoga, we had the chance to try out some partner poses! We reviewed the double boat and seesaw pose and learned a new forward bend pose. Not only is this great for the student’s bodies, but it is helping them learn important communication skills! They have to use kind words to talk to their partner about the way their bodies are feeling when doing various poses. The class loves yoga time, but did especially well today! They were focused and remained to master their partner poses and this showed! Here are some pictures from our yoga session today!

Veronika Lewis and Ally Wessels
Blog about Miss Estridge and Mrs. Bucher’s classes 10/31/12

Today was a great and busy day! There were multiple instances of discovery today during math workshop. One of the students observing the one hundreds chart before math workshop shouted out “Ooh Miss. Estridge, I noticed something new”. Of course we were all eager to see what was found. She noticed that as you go down the number chart in the same column, the number goes up by ten and has the same number in the second digit every time. For example, she pointed out how after 9 it goes, 19, 29, 39, 49, etc. “There’s always a 9!” After that student made this discovery, so many other students started to notice a pattern and math workshop journals working with tens today went a lot faster for many of them due to their newly learned knowledge. Miss Estridge afterwards let them explore the pattern by coming up to the chart and asking for proof of their knowledge. “What is 47 plus 10?” Ms. Estridge said, and the class IMMEDIATELY answered “57” in unison. Miss Estridge exclaimed, “How do you know that so fast?” “That’s when the children explained the pattern to Miss Estridge and took on the teacher role, proud of their new findings.

Before story workshop, both Mrs. Bucher and Ms. Estridge’s classes discussed the effect of critiquing and how to make each other’s final products better using each other’s knowledge. One student in Miss Estridge’s class went up to another to ask for a critique. He was making a comic book and so far had done huge drawings with minimal written words on the pages. His critique was to make it look more like a comic book by making pictures smaller, and boxing them up. The fact the kids were comfortable enough to approach each other for help and ideas at such a young age made this an exciting event of the day. They understood the idea of critiquing really well!
Mrs. Bucher’s class discussed current events which are beneficial when learning to teach real world experiences. Since hurricane Sandy has been such an apparent topic in the news recently Mrs. Booker decided to bring it up to her class and see what some of their responses would be when posed with the question “How would you help them?”. Multiple ideas were given about raising money. One student said, “We can use the money in my piggy bank to fly out there and help them.” Another boy said to buy tools to rebuild and fix things. The Butler School 60 is so generous and full of amazing ideas to attempt to solve real world problems.
We fed the chickens today in Miss Estridge’s class! What a fun experience. The special part of chicken week for Miss Estridge’s class today was that a child suggested doing observational research or drawings of the chickens, their coup, and eggs during the feeding time. This was such a wonderful idea that multiple children chose to partake in this. The fact they wanted to explore chickens beyond just feeding them was awesome. The kids also collected two eggs today and since it was the last day of the month, they were used to bake cupcakes for the class! There were two children’s birthdays in October so at the end of the month, today, they were celebrated. These two kids got to partake in the making of these cupcakes and learned about experimentation and recipe in the kitchen. Awesome real life exploration for them!

Today, our students from Butler taught during many parts of the day!  Miss Gitskin did a read aloud that introduced another author for our upcoming author study.  She introduced the idea of word choice to the students and we noticed that sometimes authors repeat their words to add emphasis or create a rhythm.  Chairo used some repeating phrases in his story and then he was able to share this with the class at the end of Story Workshop.

During math, each of the Butler students chose a read aloud connected to one of the math concepts we’ve worked on this year.  The students worked in small groups with the Butler friends and listened to their book and then completed a problem connected to it in their math journals.  The students were very engaged and loved hearing stories during math workshop!

This week in our math journals, we have been working to take a big jump of 10 from a single digit number using a hundreds chart. On Monday, I presented students with a journal problem and gave them little instruction. They utilized strategies that we have practiced before, like drawing pictures and using bead strings, but nobody utilized the hundreds charts that were laying out. While students were able to come to the correct answer, their strategies were not efficient.

On Tuesday, we explored the chart together looking at patterns that we noticed. One student brought up the tens place being the same if you look down the column, so we investigated further and realized this happens because each number in a column is ten apart! This knowledge allowed students to solve their journal problem much fast because they took a big jump of ten using the chart.

Tomorrow, we will begin to explore the number line as another math tool to use when solving problems.

Yesterday, we took some to connect our current project with this week’s readers workshop study on perspective.

At the end of the day, after packing up, we all met together on the big rug to read a book about a shark’s food chain. We have read a couple books about food chain’s in general, but this was our first time looking specifically at the food chain of a shark. The book was excellent because it started with plankton, all the way at the very bottom of the food chain and then moved up, all the way to the top with the great white shark! We talked about plankton, mussels, lobsters, octopi, sea lion, and then sharks.

In the book, it stated that the great white shark doesn’t have any real predators that try to eat it. However, one of our students shared that, in some countries, people cut off the fins of sharks. After hearing this, we took some time to consider what a person’s perspective usually is when thinking of sharks. Then we took some time to consider what a shark’s perspective might be of humans, now knowing that some humans are predators of sharks. It was interesting to see the kids take some time to think about the fact that, these huge “dangerous” animals who are often times viewed as scary by humans, might actually be afraid of us.

One of our students has suggested that we build a large food chain of a shark to show other people in our school what a shark eats. My goal is that this study of a sharks food chain will lead to a greater understanding of how one animal impacts other animals and its ecosystem. Eventually, my dream would be for that understanding to transfer over to how each individual in OUR ecosystem (our school/classroom) impacts others!