IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today, we put our plan into action- we cleaned up the garden! We put our gardening gloves on and talked about the difference between weeds and plants and went to it. Old plants were put into the compost bin to rot and become fresh organic matter and soil that will help our garden grow next year. Friends loved getting their hands dirty and doing some hard work! Mr. Henderson and I are finding that our class has a special interest in our outdoor space- just like last year! This is interesting because gardening was one of our large class project. We are wondering if the children will become more and more interested and this profound affection for the garden will develop into something more…

At recess today, the kids continued discussion about living things in the garden and dug up worms! Many, many friends, including ones that are not in our class, were enthralled with the idea of finding worms and placing them in the “worm hotel”. Some friends from last year even shared that they knew that worms could be beneficial to our garden.

Tags: capable, garden, inspiration, responsible

Today, with the help of our Butler friends, we did a couple activities today during math workshop focused on making ten! Some students used playing cards to play a game called “Make 10 Memory.”. This game involves turning number cards ace-9 face down between two people. When it is your turn, a player can flip over two card, add them together, and see if they get 10. If they do, they keep the cards. If not, they put them back and it is their opponent’s turn. Everyone loved the game and did a great job transferring their knowledge to make a chart of all the number combinations that add to get 10. This is a great game to play at home, so ask your child to teach you the rules!

In class today, we started talking about gifts that we bring to our community.  Together, we read the book Ish by Peter Reynolds.  In the story it talks about a little boy and how he drew tons and tons of pictures.  He would draw them and his sister would secretly save them.  One day she showed him the gallery she had created out of the drawings he had made.  With his sister’s help, the boy in the story realized he had a gift of drawing!  As a class we talked about how gifts are important.  We each bring our own gifts that can help others.  Here are a few gifts from our friends.

*Jonah- I bring the gift of playing games.

*Joseph- I being the gift of building.

*Melina- I bring the gift of music.

*Aasha- I bring the gift of creativity.

*David- I bring the gift of drawing.

Last week we introduced Ready Rooster-that is getting our mouths ready to start sounding out a word. Today we introduced Stretchy Snake! Stretchy Snake helps us figure out those hard words. I gave each friend a slinky a.k.a. Stretchy Snake and when they got to a word they did not know they stretched out the slinky which helped them separate the sounds-thus figuring out the actual word. I was so proud of the friends because I looked around and saw many of them using the stretchy snakes to help figure out the words!

One of the new Word Work activities this week is tapping out the sounds of words. Each friend has three lights. I say a word, and then they tap out the sounds. If there are three sounds like c-a-t then they would tap all three lights. If the word is m-e then they would only tap two lights. After the children tapped out the sounds they then tried and spell the words. The children LOVED playing this game and were so sad when it was time to clean up!

With the many weather reports we have had these past couple of weeks, the weather symbols that were first made have deteriorated a little bit so we talked about maybe making some new symbols that might be stronger. Makayla and Noah offered to paint the symbols so we have begun creating those!

This week, it is our responsibility to be chicken and garden stewards! We went outside and to our delight, there were 6 eggs to collect from our girls. After we fed the chickens, we took a look at the garden and noticed all the changes from the beginning of the year. We noticed many of the plants have gone to bolt (have flowered) and are about done producing. We noticed some plants still need to be harvested and may need a little more time (peppers!). We talked about what needs to be done this week to take care of the garden. Some suggestions were:

weeding

pulling out bolted plants

watering

making pesto from basil

We plan to act on this list tomorrow. The garden is such a wonderful space for us. We are so lucky to have it. 🙂

Tags: chickens, curious, garden, responsible