IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Yoga is quickly becoming one of our favorite times of the day in room 107! Our yoga specialist, Mrs. Williams, is at school on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. We still have yoga on Mondays and Tuesdays, but I lead it on those days and help the students practices some of the positions and routines they are learning the rest of they week. Take a look at some of the moves we have learned so far!

Danielle and Abel focus on their breathing upon entering the classroom.

Olivia and Cece do the downward dog.

Davi does a variation of downward dog, the dolphin.

As we begin to calm down, Kynden shows us how to do child’s pose.

John does the butterfly towards the end of our routine.

Jamaria shows us how we end our yoga time…by mediating with a relaxing, lavender scented eye pillow.

Story Workshop was so great today because I had so many friends writing! Friends were writing books that had so much depth to it. Friends that had built a story using blocks were now writing their story in a blank book. Friends that had used story stones to build stories were now writing their stories down in a blank book. I love it! I see so much passion and natural excitement to tell stories that their books are reflecting it. So excited for this year for so many reasons but to see how their writing develops really thrills me!

Today we played a game called Rhyme Time. We stand in a circle, and in a duck, duck, goose, fashion one child goes around rhyming words with an initial word. When they cannot think of another word that rhymes with their first word they say a totally random word like hamburger. When the children hear that word they have to sit down as fast as possible. The children really loved playing this game today and were disappointed when we had to stop playing. Isn’t it awesome to have a game that is fun, collaborative, and educational!!

Today in Reader’s Workshop I told the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We discussed how Goldilocks kept trying to find things that were “just right” for her.  We realized that as readers, we also need to find “just right” books.  The students had so many great strategies for figuring out if their books were “just right” for them: “You can look at the title and see if you think you’ll like it” “You can see how many words are hard for you. . . 4 or 5 means its too hard” “You can make sure that you are understanding your story.” After we read David shared that he found a just right book in his book bag because he understood it and there were only a few tricky words.  I am so proud of our progress in Reader’s Workshop.  The students are already reading independently for about 15-20 minutes.  We will keep working on finding “just right” books all week!

Sharing is such an important part of our day. With each workshop we end with a sharing time. During this time the children are the experts sharing what they have worked on during the independent time. What I love about the sharing time is that the children are teaching each other. They are sharing what strategies they worked on or sharing how proud they are with themselves with others.

The three pictures I am sharing today are three examples of what sharing looks like. Joe is sharing a book that he read today during Readers Workshop! He was so proud of himself and we wanted to share that with others. While reading, you could see Joe just beaming with confidence which is what we want from our readers!

Heaven worked on creating a story with blocks with Selah, Alejandra, and Jamari. While I was conferencing with her, I noticed that she was telling me all about what they had built but it was not in a story format. It was “This is my house. This is the road. This is the car. etc.” So, I challenged Heaven to tell a story using those ideas. When it was time to share, Heaven did an amazing job telling the story. She started with “Once upon a time…”and told a great story!

Alejandra, I noticed, did something that we had not talked about before during Math Workshop today. She opened her notebook and she circled the numbers in the number story so that it would be easier to remember what the numbers were. I thought that was a brilliant idea (I was going to introduce that strategy next week) and it came from Alejandra! The children really complimented her on that strategy so I am interested to see if anyone does it tomorrow.

So…when I went into school this morning our dear friend Crystal Speeder was not doing very well so I decided to let it go because I did not want to make it worse. A few friends asked about Crystal Speeder, but the newness of today kept their minds off of our friend. Fare thee well Crystal Speeder!

We welcomed three new friends in our class today! Noah, Sarah, and Danielle did such an amazing job just jumping in and joining us in the various parts of the day! I was so proud of them, and I was so proud of our friends for being so supportive and welcoming to our new friends!

Today we began something new we will do each day. Sometimes it takes a while at the bathroom in the morning so we have begun doing our Morning Message in the hallway. I already wrote the message today, and it included three words that will be on our Word Wall: is, you, we The children wrote in one of the journals you provided. It is called the Morning Message. Not all of the children got it all done, but we will do this every morning so we will see a progression from each child with their writing! They seemed to really enjoy this time and it helped make the bathroom time go quicker.

Today we also introduced math notebooks. These math notebooks will be something the children will do four days out of the week. Today I put a simple addition problem because I wanted the children to get the procedures of how we are going to do it each day. We have been talking about the various tools we can use to help us solve problems so the math notebook is somewhere where we can write down the strategy we used to solve the problem. We will begin differentiating the problems once we get the procedures down (which will be soon because the children did awesome today!!) I look forward to showing you the progress of each child with their problem solving!