Spring SAVY 2019, Day 3 – Witty Wordplay (1st/2nd)
Eleven enthusiastic and energized writers were emboldened and eloquently empowered to explore the elements of elevating words using the earsplitting language system of onomatopoeia, and entertaining tongue twisters, Bam! We were all a buzz today while we read examples of these witty word play language techniques. Selections that we read were Dooby Dooby Moo, Rusty Spigot, and I Know All the Sounds that Animals Make. Our opening book this morning really helped loosen our lips with a zipwhen we read Miss Alaineus (a vocabulary disaster).
Our witty word play is contagiously amusing, and our knowledge of how to apply author’s techniques is a blast as we enhance our writing. Students are connecting everything we are learning back to systems of language, especially when we think of boundaries with each new technique that we explore. I brought in thesauruses from my classroom, and I was thrilled to see students actually using them to find just the right words they were searching to drop into their writing to more vividly convey their message and purpose. As you read with your student at home, I encourage you to stop at points in the text, and discuss words the author uses as well as what the purpose of those intentionally selected words are to convey the author’s purpose/message.
After discussing what a sentence is, it was a lot of fun to see the confused looks on the faces of each student, when I handed them two index cards with a scrambled sentence, and they had to think about how to change the order of the words to give the sentence understanding. We then discussed how sentences are formed as a system and if the words are not in an order to make sense, the sentence understanding is askew and impacts readability and meaning. System tie-ins are popping up everywhere!
One of the highlights of our morning was learning Pig Pen Secret Code using our American alphabet to communicate. Students saw how this, too is a system of communicating using boundaries/rules to create phrases and sentences using the code. Two students even worked together to see if they could add numbers to the Pig Pen alphabet coding system to add complexity. As we assimilated all we had learned today and discovered, it was time to write and illustrate. Students wrote poems using whatever author’s technique they chose, and then painted their own illustrations of their text. We will be finishing those pieces next week and adding more!
I am looking forward to continued witty word play next week! Eek, I hope everyone is well. We really missed those who were absent this week.
Ms. Tyson
Painting and Codework
