IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

This morning, Bea brought in something quite interesting- a pomegranate! Many friends had never tried one and were excited to taste the juicy seeds. After tasting, we noticed how many extra seeds were left inside. Bea immediately had an idea- “We need to put them in our grow lab!” All of our friends agreed. We planted three separate containers several pomegranate seeds in each. This led us to a conversation we had last week, about planting other things. Last week, Tajanaye had a wonderful suggestion- to plant seeds and grow seed starters for a special sale and to raise money for our garden. We revisited this conversation after planting the pomegranate seeds, and Tajanaye remarked, “We can sell the seeds and people can give them to grandmas who are sick or people can hang them on their porch.”

Regan added, “If people have a family member that doesn’t have any food, we can give it to them and them can keep it.”

“If someone was sick like your brother or sister you could give it to them as a present.” Bea

Makenzi added, “It would be so kind. So kind. I would like to have a selling party, after our author celebration. Maybe we can put a lot of water to them and they will grow.”

This being said, we decided we would plant an entire package of carrot seeds in Keurig cups in our grow lab and get them started for our sale. Lucas brought up that he believed using these K cups was recycling.

“I think its recycling. I think I saw a book at Mrs. Clark’s class about rethink, reduce, recycle.” Lucas

“I was in Mrs. Clark’s class last year! We made up a song for recycling. It means you reuse, rethink and use it for something else instead of storing it in the trash.” BreAnna

These are such powerful connections for the kids to make. I am excited for exploring other green ways to enhance our garden this year.

We had another great day of building our mouse city, as well. The kids really worked as team to share supplies and negotiate tasks to get done for their buildings and stick to their plans.

Tags: collaboration, garden, geometry, problem solving, recycling, responsible

After drawing our plans and labeling what shapes we would need, we excidetly went into action on Friday! Friends were encouraged to grab various boxes and containers that were the shapes they had listed on their drawings, and then followed their construction plan. It was such an exciting time. This experience was a great opportunity to practice communication skills and negotiation, as friends realized they needed to work with their partners while deciding on exactly which size of shape to take. After working for quite a bit, some groups started to realize, “We need more materials!” “Like what?” I replied. The kids were then asked to write down on the back of their plans what other materials they would need to continue this process. Materials listed were:

markers

scissors

paint

paper

pencils

glue

wheels

Today, we will refer to our materials needed, gather, and go from there!

Tags: building, collaboration, geometry

Thursday morning, we had another note from Sam and mouse! He asked us to build a city for him and his family with all of the things a regular city would have. This led us to make a list of building we knew that helped people in our community (beauty shop, school, library, museum, school, houses, etc)

Later on the in the day, we chose which areas of the city we would prefer to work on. Some friends are working with partners, some are working on their own. We talked about the idea of planning out our buildings before we just build, so we practiced thoughtfully drawing our buildings and labeling which shapes we would be needing in the building phase.

Tags: collaboration, geometry, problem solving, project