IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

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

It was a wonderful, peaceful, and happy day today. This morning, we learned two new sight words, come and from, and we had a blast creating new jingles to help us remember them. The one for come is really beautiful, have your child sing it to you! I love how our class has been collaborating on creating music together for our sight words- it seems to fit so well with our Listening/Sound project!

This week, we are also examining different holidays that are celebrated around this time of year. Today, we learned about the traditions of Hanukkah and compared and contrasted them to traditions we know for Christmas. We had a great discussion about whether it was OK or not for people to celebrate different holidays (we decided it was, because “Everyone can be different”- BreAnna). We also read a story about a child who celebrated both of those holidays, which we also decided was ok (“Another different thing, an ok thing!”- Makenzi). We look forward to delving into more traditions as the week goes on.

Tags: collaboration, curious, differences, holidays, music, project, sound, traditions

Yesterday at the Rhythm Discovery Center, we learned that forte means loud and piano means soft. Today, we experimented with dancing to music that was forte and piano. When the music got really loud, friends were encouraged to make their bodies “big”, reach tall, and do big movements. When the music was piano, we crouched down low, were quiet, and made small movements.

Tags: curious, music, project, sound

Today we went on our field trip to the Rhythm Discovery Center downtown! It was incredible! The Rhythm Discovery Center is basically “An instrument museum” (Greyson’s words).  We learned about  different types of instruments, many we had never seen or heard of before! Our guide was fabulous and gave us an opportunity to play many of the instruments, including a giant tam tam and a giant gong! At the end of our visit, we formed a drum circle and played with our guide. We practiced playing fast and slow, soft (piano) and loud (forte). Afterwards, we had some freestyle time and friends were given the opportunity to play and dance. It was such a joyful time.

Afterwards, we had lunch in the Indianpolis Arts Garden. To our delight, several choirs were there singing Christmas carols. It was such a peaceful and enjoyable lunch! I was so proud too, our class had many compliments about how good of an audience we were being. I was so glad our class was able to end our field trip with a real life performance- it just seems fitting. The perfect ending to the perfect day!

Tags: field trip, music, project, sound

Today, we continued to discover new genres of music. We practiced moving our bodies to bluegrass and classical music! This afternoon, I played one of the kids’ favorite genres thus far- polka- and gave them a challenge. Close your eyes and think of a story that matches the music. The stories were incredible. Dancing bears, magic holes, donkeys on mountains- the works! Friends were then encouraged to tell those stories during Story Workshop, while more polka music played. Its incredible how music affects our creativity. We are excited to try this again tomorrow, except with a new genre… What types of stories will we get then?

Tags: creativity, project, story telling, story workshop, writing