IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Last week, one of our classmates moved to Michigan.  On Friday, Sophia had her last day in our classroom.  While we all already miss her, we did something very exciting for her today!  Over the past few weeks we have been studying types of letters.  The past few days, we talked about writing friendly letters.  The kids wrote letters to our friend Sophia!  This afternoon, we walked to the mailbox and dropped in our letters to be mailed to Sophia!  I hope she is as excited to receive the mail as we were to write it!

Tyler and CJ are working together to send their letter to Sophia!

Olivia is sending her letter to Sophia!

BreAnna is sending her letter to Sophia!

J'Nayla is sending her letter to Sophia!

Yesterday we began talking about thinking about our thinking while reading so that we can better understand what it is we are reading. I told them that the term for that is metacognition. Today we continued to talk about it and we further discussed why it is important to ask questions and think about our reading. It was clear the kiddos are really understanding the thinking about our thinking because after a friend shared today Saa said, “They were thinking about their thinking!” We are going to discuss this further, but I wanted to let you know what great thinkers we have in our class!

Selah and Tylisha were working together to measure basil.

Now that are garden is growing, we are taking advantage of the math opportunities around us daily!  Today we went outside to measure a few different plants that have been growing in our garden.  In small groups, the kids measured basil, broccoli, peppers, and rosemary.  Over the next few weeks we are going to be tracking their growth and recording the information in a class graph!  After today, a few kids are already looking forward to when we go and measure again next week.  🙂

Last week we began discussing geometry in class. We reviewed the basic shapes and specifically focused on the attributes of each. This week we are exploring how many triangles fit in a square. I posed this question to the children today and it was quite interesting to see what the children thought was “right.” There were many different answers and the conclusion of our discussion today was that no one person was right because depending on the size of the square and the way you made your triangles told you how many triangles you had. We are going to explore this the rest of the week focusing on different triangles on Friday.

Today we had our egg drop and the kids just LOVED cheering for their friends and seeing which eggs stayed safe and which eggs broke. It was such a good experience for the children to hypothesize, conduct an experiment, and see if their hypothesis was correct. We might do this again to see if the children will make any changes to their houses.