New Month Monday

We were so excited to come to school today and realize that it was a brand new month!  Some of us are very anxious for the month of Decemember because there are so many exciting activities at this time. 

Our WOW word of the week is glisten- to reflect sparkling light.  We did a fabulous job using this word in sentences and showing that we understand the meaning.  We also made the connection that we know a song that is sort of like glisten- Shine Like a Diamond by Rihanna.  When we were using this word in sentences a few first graders used "glimmer" and "sparkle" instead and realized that these words are all very similar.

In SWR this week we are practicing making words into plurals (more than one) by adding the letter "s" to the end.  We learned that when an s is at the end of a word it can say "sssss" or "zzzzz" we thought of many words where this was true:

Sounds like "s": toys, girls, boys, lips, bibs, lids, trips
Sounds like "z": his, homes, phones, pigs, labs, crabs

When we practiced adding s to the end of words, some of us forgot to add the final consonant sound!  When we wrote pigs instead of writing p-i-g-s, we wrote p-i-s.  Intead of writing b-i-b-s we wrote b-i-s.  We talked about how important it is to listen to the ending sound/s of a word and to always remember what we know about words when we're writing.  Even though we're adding something new (s) we can't forget what we already know!

In math today we (finally!!!) we able to use tape measures.  Our tape measures have inches on one side and centimeters on the other.  We realized that tape measures can be easier to use because they are smaller but they can measure larger items when they're all spread out!  We had a great time measuring our wrists, elbows, ankles, heads and hands with a partner.  We also practiced part/whole number relationships by adding with dominoes.  We added to parts together to get a whole and we also found the missing part by looking at the whole and 1 part.

During reading we looked for __ing and ___s at the end of words.  We found so many!  We learned that sometimes you can't just add an "S" to a word to make it plural, but you need to add an "es" or even an "ies" if the word ends in y and sounds like "ee".  There are so many things to remember when we read and write- the more we practice, the better!  The first graders love learning all about words and letters and finding them in their own books and using them in their stories.

We read two weather books today and learned about the water cycle.  Our VIP science word of the day is evaporate.  Evaporation is when the sun heats up water in rivers, lakes or oceans and turns it into vapor or steam.  The water vapor or steam leave the river, lake or ocean and goes into the air.