Fantastic Monday Back

Joud chose to lead Morning Meeting for her awesome behavior! She is tallying the class results for our daily poll.

Wow!  We had such a wonderful first day back together.  We got right to work with our new red word in SWR: are.  We discussed how this is a tricky word because it can sound a lot like or and our. Our new word families this week are "___ip" and "___ib".  We realized that many of the words in these families sound the same and we have to listen very carefully for the ending sounds.  We did a fabulous job generating words in these families before we even learned them and we came up with sibling, triple, and shipwrecked- wow!

Our WOW word this week is anxious- nervous or excited.  We talked about how it can mean both of those words, and how they are different.  You might be the nervous type of anxious if it's your turn at bat and there are two strikes already.  You might be the excited type of anxious if it's Christmas Eve or the night before the first day of school.  

In math we started a brand new unit that is all about measuring.  We started by measuring the temperature and reading thermometers.  We will be discussing the temperature and weather a lot in the next couple of weeks (our new science unit is weather too!), so expect your first grader to be looking for weather/temperature related stories and things at home.  

During reading we learned that there are 5 (sometimes 6) vowels in our alphabet.  The vowels are A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y.  Did you know that every word HAS to have a vowel?  We played a funny game where we wrote our names without vowels- it didn't work!  Can you figure out any of these names without their vowels?

vr
Tckr
Rn
Mttw
ng
Wllh
Jd
Jrdn
Hnnh
Smmr
Trc
Mss Trrn
Hl
Cnnr
Cln
Mrk
Gvn
v

Crazy, right?  

As we write new stories in Writer's Workshop this week we will be focusing on making sure all of our words have vowels when we edit.  

Check out these students practicing the new skills they have learned during Reader's Workshop:

 Joud showed vowels in the alphabet and worked on work family words and sight words.

 Ryan F. was so thrilled to find the red word, are, in his reading group book.

 Summer remembered to capitalize names of people and ended her sentence with a period.

Ryan F. built a sentence explaining why he is anxious.  We talked about how you show you know the meaning of a word by using "because" and giving an example.

At the end of reading we had an amazing thing happen- Ryan B. made it all the way up to Super Student because he had been working hard ALL day!  Ryan called his mom at home to tell her he made it to super student.  He thought that was pretty awesome!

Our new science unit is all about weather!  The first graders know a lot about weather and are fascinated by weather such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and monsoons.  We will learn about all of those things, and more, but our main focus while we learn about weather is the water cycle.  Some key words to be on the lookout for will be: precipitation, evaporation, condensation, continuous, and cycle.  We were so lucky because today we were able to see the water cycle first-hand in a very obvious way!  We also read a story today about mice who get caught in a rainstorm and what they do to find shelter.