IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

This week, we began learning about the strategy of stretching out the sounds in words to help us read them. To help kids remember this strategy, we created an animal. His name is stretchy the snake. Stretchy has been showing kids how to start at the beginning of the word, make that sound, and then slowly make the sounds of each following letter or group of letters, until you reach end of the word.

Stretchy the Snake

Last week Ready Rooster showed us how to get our mouths ready for the beginning letter or sound in a word (and sneak peek, but promise not to tell your kids! Next week, Chunky Monkey is going to show us how to look for familiar chunks of letters within a word)!

Each child received a small slinky as a tool to help them stretch out the words in their books. They really seem to be getting the idea of it all! See if you child can show you how they stretch out their words at home!

Danielle uses her slinky to stretch out one of the words in her book!

We have been talking a lot about good partner work.  What does good partner work look like and sound like? The children have been working together in both reader’s workshop and math workshop.  They shared that good partner work means:

De’Onna: “niceness”

Daysia: ‘having fun working with your partner”

Himiko: “talking nicely to your partner”

David: “learning from your partner so they can help you learn more”

Today we experienced partner work during a new time of the day. . .YOGA! It was so exciting to see the collaboration and cooperation that happened throughout the room.  Mrs. Williams and I were impressed with their first day of partner work and we are excited to see how they continue to grow as they work together!

Today, we put our plan into action- we cleaned up the garden! We put our gardening gloves on and talked about the difference between weeds and plants and went to it. Old plants were put into the compost bin to rot and become fresh organic matter and soil that will help our garden grow next year. Friends loved getting their hands dirty and doing some hard work! Mr. Henderson and I are finding that our class has a special interest in our outdoor space- just like last year! This is interesting because gardening was one of our large class project. We are wondering if the children will become more and more interested and this profound affection for the garden will develop into something more…

At recess today, the kids continued discussion about living things in the garden and dug up worms! Many, many friends, including ones that are not in our class, were enthralled with the idea of finding worms and placing them in the “worm hotel”. Some friends from last year even shared that they knew that worms could be beneficial to our garden.

Tags: capable, garden, inspiration, responsible

In class today, we started talking about gifts that we bring to our community.  Together, we read the book Ish by Peter Reynolds.  In the story it talks about a little boy and how he drew tons and tons of pictures.  He would draw them and his sister would secretly save them.  One day she showed him the gallery she had created out of the drawings he had made.  With his sister’s help, the boy in the story realized he had a gift of drawing!  As a class we talked about how gifts are important.  We each bring our own gifts that can help others.  Here are a few gifts from our friends.

*Jonah- I bring the gift of playing games.

*Joseph- I being the gift of building.

*Melina- I bring the gift of music.

*Aasha- I bring the gift of creativity.

*David- I bring the gift of drawing.

This week, it is our responsibility to be chicken and garden stewards! We went outside and to our delight, there were 6 eggs to collect from our girls. After we fed the chickens, we took a look at the garden and noticed all the changes from the beginning of the year. We noticed many of the plants have gone to bolt (have flowered) and are about done producing. We noticed some plants still need to be harvested and may need a little more time (peppers!). We talked about what needs to be done this week to take care of the garden. Some suggestions were:

weeding

pulling out bolted plants

watering

making pesto from basil

We plan to act on this list tomorrow. The garden is such a wonderful space for us. We are so lucky to have it. 🙂

Tags: chickens, curious, garden, responsible