IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

All Cooped Up: Since the spring, the Butler Lab School 60 has been engaging their students with a chicken coop! The chickens are laying eggs in the chicken coop and the students have opportunities to observe and watch.  The classes alternate week by week and each get to feed and give water to the chickens.  This week Miss Cegielski’s class fed the chickens and found one egg on Wednesday.

Lately Miss Cegielski’s students have shown interest in Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery in the past.  Miss Cegielski has been displaying books and asking the students questions which has led to incredible conversation in the class! The students are incredibly interested about this topic and have treated the issue very respectfully.

-Carly Plumlee

Update from the Butler classroom: Outside of the classroom, we have been working hard on completing our Teacher Research Reports.  Throughout the entire semester, some of our work has been centered around a question we came up with at the start of the semester.  As we have compiled data and implemented interventions with the children, we have accumulated loads of work to help us with our findings.  We are currently in the process of putting all of this data in to one place, the Teacher Research Binder.  In this will include our question, context (data about the school, classroom, focal child), information on our question, our interventions (work completed with focal child), findings, and conclusions.  While completing this report and looking back at the past few months, it has been extremely enlightening, and has made the entire semester of work seem extremely worthwhile.  It has been a joy to work with the kids at the Lab School, and we have learned as much from the kids as they have from us.

-Bo Davidson

Dreams Come True: I (Maggie) am placed in the preschool classroom at School 60, also known as St. Mary’s.  My favorite thing about St. Mary’s is that the students direct their own learning and the teachers administer it.  One way I can example this was when Mae, a three year old, came into class talking about a dream she had the night before. She said that she woke up in the middle of the night because she was painting leaves in her dream.  She was fascinated by this and could not stop talking about this. Ms. Fogler, the head teacher, asked Mae if she would like to paint leaves and other parts of nature in class. Of course, Mae and all the other students were more than excited for this activity! They all went outside and picked up leaves, sticks, branches, etc. and then painted them in the classroom.  This is a perfect example of how students direct the classroom, but the teacher administers it.  It is the teacher’s job to find things that the students are interested and put them in a project.

-Maggie Harbison

Selam and Tylisha working together in Math Workshop.

This week we are finishing up our unit on place value by studying expanded form.  Over the past few weeks, I have really seen the kids grow in their number awareness.  I am so proud of the way that all of the kids can break apart numbers into the thousands (YES!  thousands!), hundreds, tens, and ones.  Today, I want to share a story about Selam and Tylisha.  These two have been partners a few times, but not each day.  These two started working together and I came over to see their thinking.  I was not only blown away by their ability to discuss and share the ideas, but also when they did disagree once they were able to talk it out and come to a conclusion.  Many of our kids do this on a daily basis so I wanted to share a snapshot of what Mr. Ward and I see each day!

Today was such a fun day! Visiting WISH-TV opened our eyes to what a studio is like and how a lot of people work together to put on a single show. We got the opportunity to take a tour of the studio and see where the team works while gathering the news. Then we went into the actual newsdesk and saw Randy Ollis, and other WISH-TV employees getting prepared for the Noon news. We learned about the green screen and were able to see ourselves on it! We also got to see the cameras that they use to film, and what was so cool was that they are robots! After we saw the studio we went upstairs to an observation room and watched the noon news come to life. The children loved watching the anchors read the teleprompter, and it was SO exciting to see Randy Ollis do his forecast!! After seeing the forecast, we headed downstairs and went to see another studio where there was a full kitchen! We were able to then take a class picture behind the newsdesk!

I was so proud of our friends today and thought they did such a nice job being respectful and staying engaged!

When we got back and discussed what we liked about the field trip or what we learned, and there were a lot of friends that shared that they loved and learned a lot about robots..maybe a provocation that we will explore next!

Now, the day was great, but then it got better because we celebrated Maddie, Jamari, and Miss Jeffrey’s birthdays! The children loved being able to eat cupcakes at the end of the day and really share the happiness and fun from the day!

This is a question Mr. Ward has been asking the kids for the past few days: “Is it a solid, liquid, or gas?”  Each day in morning meeting this week Mr. Ward has presented one of the three states of matter and we have been having short discussions on each of them.  The kids were so interested in the small things we talked about with our Children’s Museum investigation, We decided from that to continue talking about the different types of matter.  The conversations have been fun to hear and see what the kids notice.  We will be continuing with these conversations and explorations in the next few weeks!

Noah H. has been focusing on making a Robot series during Story Workshop for the past month or so. I asked him if and how he was going to store the books, and we thought of making a Robot book holder. Noah first showed me what he wanted the robot to look like. Then we talked about some ideas for materials, and today we started building it! Noah after painting his robot is going to add slinky arms and legs, flashy lights, and make it open to place his Robot series in there.

I love being able to collaborate with children and see their fantastic ideas come to life!