IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today was our first day of physical education this year at the Lab School.

As many of you have heard our kids have been working very hard on their independent author study books.  We made personal invitations in class today, but just another reminder, we will be celebrating all of this great work on Wednesday from 6-7 at the school!  The kids are looking forward to sharing their hard work with all of you!

Today we got an email from Miss Schmidt’s class asking if we would like to be individual pen pals and learn about one specific friend. We decided we would definitely like to do that! We let them know that we would like to start as soon as possible- and will be starting tomorrow! How exciting!

We also had an oppurtunity to write some mail to Mr. Henderson, our former student teacher. Miss Crume, a student teacher in Miss Cegielski’s room and friend of his, let us know that he would love to hear from us. We had a nice conversation about being homesick and what that may feel like (Mr. Henderson is all the way in Portland, OR) and talked about how we could use supportive, positive words to brighten his day. We wrote individual notes and also write him a big class note asking him about his new class and what Portland is like. We hope to hear back from him soon.

Lastly, Jackson’s mom, Mrs. Bauer, recently shared an incredible website called POSTCROSSING.com On the website, you register and then gain access to an address where you can send a postcard to. The amazing part is the addresses are just about everywhere in the world! Once you send a postcard to a new friend, you receive a postcard from someone (also a new friend). Today, we received our first ‘assignment’ from Postcrossing- and we got to write to a person in Bulgaria! We had a chance to look up Bulgaria on a world map and will be talking more about the Atlas in the coming days. We are so excited to see where our first postcard arrives from!

Tags: collaboration, community, culture, curious, friendship, mail, pen pals, student teacher, world

Today we were greeted by four new Butler friends that are Block A practicum students from Butler University. We loved getting to know Mr. Cohn, Miss Hoffman, Miss Goetz, and Miss Goodwin. These students will be with us each Monday for the rest of the semester, learning with us! We are so glad to have them.

We continued our exploration in measurement today during problem solving. Towards the end of last week, we were given a problem that said we needed to figure out how big a garden bed would be if it was as long as our table and as wide as our calendar. This led us to try to figure out the best way to measure these things and also explore the concepts of “long” and “wide”. We learned as we worked through the problem and when a friend discovered something we thought would be helpful to others, we added it to our measurement terms chart. We eventually discovered the term “perimeter” and learned that in order to all get an exact measurement, we would need to work with standard measurement- in our case, rulers. The kids have enjoyed experimenting with and learning the best ways to measure accurately with rulers. Today, the kids were challenged with another measurement/perimeter story problem. We ended up having a big debate about the difference between width and length and learned we may need to change or add to our anchor chart to clarify what these terms mean. The kids were disappointed to learn that we had to end problem solving for the day before we had all officially solved the problem but were excited to know that we would continue working on the same one tomorrow. It was a big day for us!

Tags: arithmetic, Butler, capable, collaboration, measurement

We have bee communicating with Miss Schmidt’s class at Guion Creek elementary for a few days now and they asked us an exciting question- Would we like to be pen pals? We immediately decided yes, we would love that and emailed them back to let them know. The other day, Miss Schmidt’s class asked us about all the things we like. Yesterday, we created a book called, Things We Like, and each friend wrote a page about what they like. At the end, we asked the question, “What do you like?” We hope they send us a book! We are looking forward to comparing and contrasting our interests with our new friends and continuing to explore diversity. Today, we learned about how we will mail our book, including adding postage, a return address, and a mailing address. When the weather gets better, we will hopefully take walks to the local mailbox to deliver our mail.

Yesterday, we read a story called, Mama Zooms. In the story, there is a mother who is in a wheelchair and she and her son go on pretend adventures in it. This opened up a conversation about people being different and we talked about some of the ways this mom may have been a little bit different from most moms. Then, we talked about how this mom was just like most moms. Some of the kids’ responses were so powerful.

How is this mother just like most mothers? Mrs. Argus

She can still sing a lullaby to her son. Maria

She has a heart. Cariah

She has feelings just like everyone else. Kalaya

She can think like everyone else too, with her brain! J’Den

She can cook dinner for her family still. Dylan

I have to admit, the first few responses brought tears to my eyes. I hope these lessons in diversity and tolerance will stick with the kids for their life. They understand so much already.

Tags: collaboration, community, diversity, friendship, pen pals