IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Our class has really been enjoying yoga.  We go to Yoga every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning with Mrs. Williams.  (On Mondays and Tuesdays we do it together in our classroom!) The students have been excelling in their focus, concentration, and balance.  We practice different poses and then we meditate at the end.  During meditation De’Onna said “Think of a peaceful and serene place.”  When we finished up, Daysia turned to me and said “I think we’re going to have a great day.” We are noticing that starting our day with yoga really helps our focus and peacefulness throughout the day.  I am excited to watch them grow in their yoga skills throughout this year.  Enjoy your three day weekend!

Meet Mrs. Williams!

Starting off by stretching and warming up our muscles.

Practicing our deep yoga breaths with cotton balls.

Paiton practices yoga breathing.

How far will your cotton ball go when you take a deep breath?

Meditation. . . thinking of ways to have a peaceful day!

Yesterday during math, we starts exploring the hundred chart. We examined it together, looking for patterns. Students had some wonderful noticings, especially about the columns that ended in zero and five because this is a way we commonly count.

Today, we worked as a team to create a “life-sized” ten frame on the floor of our classroom! This will allow students to be in the middle of the ten frame as they explore and give us a place where we can go to learn number patterns together. At first, we counted 1-20, but then a student suggested we count by 10s to get to 100. While this left us with an interesting looking work in progress, I am happy that the children are beginning to see patterns with the chart!

We will finish the hundred chart tomorrow, then learn a new game that we can play on it!

Today we did partner reading after our independent reading portion of readers workshop was finished. It was so wonderful to watch the children take turns reading their books to their partner. Their pride for their reading was evident as they read and read and I had to stop them from sharing their work.

We will be doing partner reading here and there as it helps children listen in a more intimate setting.

Today in studio the children worked with wire which is perfect because next week we are going to work on having the children make their gifts out of wire so that we can display them. They were very proud of their work when they entered the room so that was fun to see!

Melina enjoying her cupcake

In our classroom, we celebrate our birthdays by making cupcakes for the class.  We bake them at the end of the month and any student who had a birthday is welcomed to help.  This month, Maxwell and Kayla had a chance to make cupcakes to celebrate.  Here are a few pictures from this afternoon’s fun.

Wyatt is enjoying his cupcake.

Townes is really enjoying his cupcake.

Word study is now a constant part of our daily agenda. This is a time for students to play with letters, sounds, and words. Sometimes we do whole group word study. Other times students work independently or in pairs. Yesterday for word study, I wrote the name of one of our friends on the board. I then asked to students to go out in pairs and write down words that they could make using the letter in that name. After about five minutes, they came back and shared. Then, we came up with a few more words together.

Friends came up with eight words you can spell using the letters in Faith’s name.

This would be a really fun activity to do at home with your child. You could even write a word down on paper, and have them cut out the letters so that they could move the letters around and really build the words.

Later in the day, Spencer and Abel made math posters for us. The day before, these two friends had illustrated math strategies in their math notebooks in a very clear way. I then asked them to make a poster out of that strategy, so that I could hang it up for all friends to see and use for future problem solving. As they year continues, we will continue to add math strategies to our math board. So far, we have uni-fix cubes, tally marks, and a number line.

Abel works on his poster showing how to use tally marks.

At the end of the day, Mrs. Williams taught us how to be in control of our breathing. Each student received a cotton ball. They were told to put it on the palm of their flat hand and then try to blow the cotton ball to the very tip of their fingers. If it fell off, they had to start over. This was a great activity, even for adults. Later, students had to sit at one end of their yoga mat and try to blow their cotton ball all the way to the other end! Kids had a great time with this activity, and it is sure to lead to better breathing for yoga in the days to come.

Ben takes a deep breath and tries to blow his cotton ball all the way to the end of his yoga mat.