IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

 

 

 

 

Cameron reads his note from Eric Carle.

This week, we have been enjoying the various books by the beloved author Eric Carle. The kids have enjoyed identifying Mr. Carle’s distinguishing characteristics, including writing “repeaters”, using 5+ detail (ask your child what that means 🙂 ), writing about animals, being quite silly, and many others. We have been practicing making text to text connections during Reader’s Workshop and seeing if we can find any similarities in our books to the Eric Carle books. Today, one of our friends, Cameron, got an interesting note in his lunchbox that provoked some conversation. It read, “Dear Cameron, Thanks for reading my books. Love, Eric Carle” . Many of the kids were interested in this note and a question came up debating the validity of the note and whether Eric Carle was in fact a real person. Who was this guy anyways and how could he have gotten this note into our friend’s lunchbox? We started an investigation on Eric Carle and pulled him up on his website, EricCarle.com. We looked at his picture and read his biography, talking about how old he is and how he went to art school growing up. We will continue to talk about Eric Carle as an author and perhaps make comparissons to ourselves as authors too. Could we be famous authors one day?

Friends enjoy Eric Carle books during Read, Rest, Write.

David's observational drawing of a train!

We are at the very beginning of our train project.  This week we have been drawing trains and having lots of conversations about them!  As we begin to form our questions, we will find where our learning is going to take us.  Please keep tuned into see where we go!

During our free choice time on Friday, Larry decided to use the unifix cubes to build the Great Wall of China. Leah had read a book about the Great Wall of China and knew that there were warriors, called the Terracotta Warriors, whose job it was to guard the wall. So with many other students’ help, Leah and Larry began setting up teddy bears around the wall, to represent the Terracotta Warriors.

Today, we did a Great Wall relocation, moving the wall to the block building area. Many warriors were lost along the way, so Heleria and Nailah helped re-set up the bears during free choice time. The wall lead to some great conversations today!

Heleria and Nailah use teddy bears as terracotta warriors to defend the Great Wall of China.

Katie Jones reads with a student during Reader's Workshop.

Elyse Estridge helps a student with a project.

Amy Gaisser interacts with student at a light table in the studio.

On last Wednesday, the Block A students from the Butler University College of Education began working in our classrooms.  Today they returned to the classrooms for a second full-day of teaching experience at the IPS/Butler University Laboratory School.  In addition to working with individual students and small groups, many of the Block A students have taught lessons and read books aloud to the classes with which they work.  Several Block A students returned to school last Friday (on a day they were not even scheduled to be at our school) to participate in a class celebration with the children in room 104.  So, if your child came home recently and told you he/she has four new teachers, it is true!

Wyatt and Christina are very exctied about Mo Willems!

Jaiden loves the Piggy and Elephant books by Mo Willems.

Today we started an author study on Mo Willems in Reader’s Workshop.  The kids have really been drawn to his work as we read them in class.  I decided this might be a great author to study.  Over the next week or so we will be looking at the different techniques Mo Willems uses in his book and what we notice about his writing.  I am sure that stories will come home about this because he is our favorite author so far!