IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Today we were greeted by four new Butler friends that are Block A practicum students from Butler University. We loved getting to know Mr. Cohn, Miss Hoffman, Miss Goetz, and Miss Goodwin. These students will be with us each Monday for the rest of the semester, learning with us! We are so glad to have them.

We continued our exploration in measurement today during problem solving. Towards the end of last week, we were given a problem that said we needed to figure out how big a garden bed would be if it was as long as our table and as wide as our calendar. This led us to try to figure out the best way to measure these things and also explore the concepts of “long” and “wide”. We learned as we worked through the problem and when a friend discovered something we thought would be helpful to others, we added it to our measurement terms chart. We eventually discovered the term “perimeter” and learned that in order to all get an exact measurement, we would need to work with standard measurement- in our case, rulers. The kids have enjoyed experimenting with and learning the best ways to measure accurately with rulers. Today, the kids were challenged with another measurement/perimeter story problem. We ended up having a big debate about the difference between width and length and learned we may need to change or add to our anchor chart to clarify what these terms mean. The kids were disappointed to learn that we had to end problem solving for the day before we had all officially solved the problem but were excited to know that we would continue working on the same one tomorrow. It was a big day for us!

Tags: arithmetic, Butler, capable, collaboration, measurement