IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today our friends were so excited to see the sun collage that they made up on the wall to show everyone else! While making the sun collage and rain collage the last few days, some friends thought that we needed to make another one-partly cloudy. So, during our project work time some friends helped make the partly cloudy collage and they were so excited to hang it up!

We are getting more and more excited about sharing the weather with others!

One of our school’s goals and one of my own personal goals for the school year is to have our student create truly beautiful work that they take great pride and care in creating. Beautiful work isn’t just limited to art work. It includes our math problem solving, our stories and books, and any other products we create during our time here at the Lab School.

One belief we have is that, in order to create your best work, you need to do multiple drafts and go through a revision process until you are sure that what you have created is the best it can be.

In order to facilitate those sorts of revision processes, I have been teaching lessons in critique during story workshop this week. We have been talking about sharing our work with our peers so that they can give us helpful feedback and we can improve our books and stories.

Two words that we have been talking about are “specific” and “kind.” Anytime we give a compliment or a suggestion, it needs to be specific and kind. So instead of saying,  I like your pictures, a child might say, “I like the drawing of your pumpkin on your cover because you included accurate details like the stem and some lines.” And instead of saying, your words don’t look good, a child could say, “I’m having a hard time reading your words. You might consider putting bigger spaces in between your words so that they don’t all smush together and your readers can read them better.”

Today, during story workshop, we practiced critiquing each others work by doing a “gallery walk.” During morning choice time, I had students do an observational drawing of a sea shell. Then, during story workshop, I hung these drawings up around the rooms. Students had the opportunity to silently walk around the room, looking at the different drawings and taking notes on the things they liked and the things that could be improved. Then, we selected two of the drawings for a class critique. Students made comments like, “I like the way you drew spikes because the real shell had spikes on it too,” or “I think you could add lines to your drawing because the real shell had curly lines on it.”

It is my hope that this practice will lead to helpful, honest critique of our work through out the year and classroom culture full of pride and care in our beautiful creations!

This week in Reader’s Workshop we have talked a lot about retelling stories using the different story elements (characters, setting, problem, supporting details, and solution.)  On Monday Mr. Ward introduced the the retelling glove and each finger had a story element on it to remember.  On Tuesday, we gave the kids bookmarks to use during their independent reading time to help them.  They were a hit!  They have been using them for two days now.  (If you look below you can see Jonah’s in his lap.)

Jonah and Reid working together to retell the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Story Elements.

In Story Workshop this week we have started an author study on Todd Parr.  Over the past few days we have been talking about things that we notice in his books.  For example, Todd Parr always writes a note to his readers at the end of each books.  Today we added that to our list to help us remember his writing.  For the rest of the week we will be learning more about Mr. Parr’s own personal life.  Be on the look out in the next few weeks.  Starting next week the kids are going to be able to pick an author they want to study with an eventual goal that they will create a piece of writing with the same style.

Today our daily question was “Do you think we should have science meetings to get ready for our field trip?”  Most of the students answered yes to the question! They are excited to start preparing to solve the mystery of the leak at the Children’s Museum.  This morning we practiced using pipettes during our science investigation: “How many drops of water can fit on a penny?”  During morning meeting, the students shared their results and we realized that we got a lot of different answers.  Here is a part of our conversation:

Cameron: “I got nine drops on heads and 10 drops on tails.”  Isabella: “I got 17 and 18 drops.”  Jermaine: “I got 20 drops.”

I then asked the students why they thought our results were so different.

Himiko: “It could be different amounts of water because we have two different pipettes.”

Chairo: “I think the pennies could be different like one could be rough and one could be smooth.”

Jermaine: “It matters if the penny is on heads or tails.”

Their theories about our different results were very thoughtful.  We will continue our investigation this week and start our science meetings soon!

Isabella and Jermaine test how many drops of water will fit on a penny.

Martavious, Kaitlyn, and Himiko investigate our penny theories from this morning.

Tomorrow is the last day for box tops! If you have any, please send them in with your child tomorrow. Thanks!