IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

During the past two weeks we have been focusing on building our classroom community.  One of the ways we do that is through our daily Morning Meeting.  Morning Meeting consists of four parts: Greeting, Share, Activity, and Message.  The goal of morning meeting is to start our day off in a positive way.  Today our greeting was called “What’s the News?”  Students ask each other what their news is and then everyone has a chance to share something they did over the weekend.  We heard about the State Fair, a Cubs game, playing outside, and so many other exciting activities.  It is so great to see the children listening to one another and wanting to get to know their friends better.  Our activities are fun songs or games where we can practice teamwork.   Our message explains what we will be doing that day for example, today the kids were pumped to learn that we are taking care of the chickens this week!

Friends sitting in our morning meeting circle

Sydney and Donovan greeting each other

Chairo and CJ playing “Double Double This This”

Paiton and Himiko using teamwork to play the game

Feeding the chickens

Saying hello to the chickens

We introduced something new into our Math Workshop today.  Each friend got a math notebook.  We will be using these math notebooks as a part of our problem solving portion of Math Workshop.  The notebooks have been in the basket all of last week and the kids were very excited today to finally get to use them!  The kids were able to take their notebook and go wherever they wanted in the room to solve their problem.  I am looking forward to using notebooks again this year as it is a great way to see each friend’s growth quickly!

William is using the legos to help him in his math notebook.

Townes is working in his math notebook.

Today was an exciting day! First we learned that we will have 1 new friend join our class on Monday (now it is up to 3 new friends) so we were talking about how supportive and welcoming we will be to the new friend(s) we will see on Monday. The children were being so sweet and saying how they were going to play with the new friend, Sarah!

Then we were outside during recess and Renna ran up to me to tell me that there was a butterfly that had been hurt and was now on the ground. I went over there and Zakeyah quickly asked if we could make it a home to make it stronger! A crowd began to form around this butterfly,and I quickly saw this as an opportunity to put into action what we had talked about this morning-being supportive and nurturing to this new pet of ours.

We took it in and every child had so many ideas about how we could nurture this butterfly and fix it! A fabulous conversation took place where we talked about what kind of home we were going to give it-examples where building it out of wood,borrowing a mesh butterfly home,volunteering family members to build it.

After we talked about the home, I asked our friends why we were doing it, and Maggie said, “to make it feel good.” Heaven then asked, “What is its name?” Again, a flurry of activity began as children were naming many names like Fluffy, Lei Lei, Ashu, Leah, Speeder, Crystal and more. At the end of the day we all took a vote and the name of our butterfly is….CRYSTAL SPEEDER!!

This experience is project work at its best..something provokes an interest, passion, emotional connection where it drives the children to think deeply, collaborate thoughtfully,and discuss intensely!

Today we experienced our first day of studio. Half of the children went to the studio with Mrs. Grotjan today. While there they talked about procedures and they did self portraits. After they were done with the self portraits Mrs. Grotjan mixed up the self portraits and then had the children guess who was on each self portrait based on the drawing itself. It was a great way for the children to look closer at the drawings.

While one half of the class was at the studio, the other half stayed with Miss Jeffrey and I for story workshop. Today I introduced watercolor painting, and it was such a hit! The children were making some really great stories with their work. I have attached some for you to see.

The last few days we have been talking about gifts that we possess. These gifts are “nice things that you give to people,” (as said by Maggie). Ashu then added that they do not have to be things that you hold-like friendship. Since we have talked about it we have been trying to use the language of gift giving to each other so that we can see what each other brings to the classroom. I will say,”I see that Noah is showing the gift of sharing because he is sharing the train with Isai.” We are going to continue to work on using this language in the classroom so that we can start to identify what gifts we each have.

During our Math Workshop lesson today we were learning about learning links and how to use them to aid in our problem solving. After we were finished doing some problems, each child had a chain of links in front of them. I then thought this would be a great time to give compliments to each other and link all of our chains together so that we can see that we cannot be our class if we do not have each friend there. We are not as strong by ourselves as we are as a group. The compliments that the children were giving were so sweet and genuine, and I know filled each friend’s bucket. We will do this compliment circle occasionally so that we can build our stamina for it as well as continue to get more specific and detailed with what we appreciate about it.