IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today our 3 Butler teachers started in our class. Every Wednesday (and the occasional Monday) our 3 new Butler teachers will be in our classroom! They did a great job this first day just jumping in and engaging with the children. I look forward to having them in our class this semester. Their names are Miss Hammer, Miss Neifert, and Miss Wessels just in case your child starts talking about various things they did with the teachers.

Today we started Word Work. During this time we break up into groups and work with letters and words-building words, chunking words, tracing letters working on letter formation, sorting words according to various patterns, etc. This will be a time that we can just focus on the letter\word\sentence formation which will aid us in our writing.

Isai came in today with a weather report written down! At the end of the day he shared his weather report with his friends, and I was so impressed with his work! The children were excited about Isai forecasting the weather for the rest of the week. We will see if this catches on…

During word study this week, we have been exploring the practice of word sorting.I have been picking a vowel and discussing with students the different sounds that vowel can make. Then, students have been going around the room “hunting” for words with that vowel in it. Yesterday we looked for “a” words and today we looked for “o” words. Students first wrote their words down on a dry erase board or clip board. Then, after about five minutes of hunting, we came back together to share our words. As as class, we listened to the words being shared and decided if they made a long vowel sound, short vowel sound, or a different sound. Deciding which sound the vowel makes can be a little challenging at first, but as we continue to practice this skill and tune our ears to hear them, students will be able to do this more naturally. Take a look at our “a” and “o” findings…

short, long, and different “o” words

short, long, and different “a” words

We were so excited to see the children today enter the classroom ready for a great day at The Lab School!

We asked a question today: What is a meteorologist? The children responded with great ideas-“someone who tells the weather,” “someone who studies meteors,” “someone who saves people.” We are going to study further what a meteorologist does and hopefully get a visit from one soon!

We have been focusing on telling stories for the past month. Today we started something new. We decided to have a more focused structure to how we are going to work Story Workshop. First the children will plan their story using whatever material they choose. The next day or once they are done planning their story, they will write their story down in a writers workshop book. They will use a printed picture of their planned story with materials to help them with their story. Once they are finished with that (should take at least two days) they can decide whether or not they would like to make a final copy (which would be added to our classroom library for all to read) or they can start planning a new story. This structure that we are using will allow the children to plan, write, edit, revise, publish stories throughout the year. Miss Jeffrey and I were really impressed today as many friends worked so hard writing down their stories!!

Since the beginning of school we have been doing addition number stories during math workshop. Today we began doing subtraction, and the children did a nice job working on those problems. Some were continuing to add the two numbers, but they did such a nice job for the first day! We talked about drawing pictures to help us figure the problems. Tomorrow we are going to use unifix cubes to help us figure out how to subtract!

On a personal note, my daughter Charlotte started school for the first time today! I can totally feel how you felt the first day of your child’s schooling! It was thrilling to see her be independent and excited to grow but sad to see her be independent and excited to grow.

We are very excited in room 107 this week because we are taking care of the…CHICKENS!

We rotate through the classrooms week by week for chicken responsibilities here at the lab school. When it is your week to take care of the chickens, you get to feed them, give them water, collect their eggs, and clean out the coop at the end of the week.

This kids were very excited to get to go out and feed the chickens today. We went out during our free choice time. Since it had been a long weekend, we were able to collect four eggs. Most days we will collect 1-3 eggs. At the end of the week, we will get to decide what we want to do with the eggs: eat them, save them, give them to someone else?

Aaliyah, Jackson, and Geneva hold three of our chickens’ eggs.

The chickens provide a great opportunity to learn about animals, our food supply, responsibility, and the needs of a living thing, just to name a few. I look forward to the days we get to learn from Thelma, Louise, and Dotty this year!

Today we played a new math game called The Train Game. This game you try and get your bear from one side to the other side of “train” (a stick of unifix cubes) first. You have to roll the dice and whatever number you roll on that is how many cubes you can move. The first person to get to the other side gets a marker. The person who gets the most markers wins. Our friends really LOVED playing this game, and what they did not know is that they were learning (ex. one to one correspondence, identifying numbers (the dice had digits instead of the standard numbers), and showing good sportsmanship.

I gave each friend a cup at the end of the day with a challenge: put it outside after school today and see if their cup would fill up from the rain! I gave them the option of taking a picture of their cup outside, drawing what happened, and\or writing down what happened to the cup when all of the rain came. Then they can bring their work in on Monday to let us know what happened! They were excited about this challenge!

Today at recess we noticed that the clouds were rolling in and we were noticing that the air felt different. We decided to grab some clipboards and paper and do an observational drawing outside of the clouds. We got great drawings and the children were noticing shapes in the clouds as well-like a dragon!