Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 5 – Playing with Words (Rising 1st/2nd)

Posted by hallep on Friday, June 14, 2019 in Grade 1, Grade 2, SAVY.

Families, thank you so much for joining us at the showcase this afternoon, and for sending your kids to Playing with Words! Miss Sarah and I had a fantastic week with this clever, enthusiastic, and punny class.

This morning, we started off with my favorite four-part riddle: How do you get a giraffe into a refrigerator? The kids were quick on the uptake, and after hearing the answers to parts one and two, they were able to follow the pattern and guess the answers to parts three and four. From riddles, we moved on to homophones. We read Gene Barretta’s Dear Deer as a class, and then we discovered the homophones hiding in some of our favorite jokes. What’s a cat’s favorite button on a TV remote? Paws!

Later in the day, we revisited our three wordplay centers. At these stations, we reviewed the books, poems, and wordless picture books we’ve studied this week, added to our wordplay booklets, and undertook some independent language study projects. At this last station, students discovered new words in the dictionary, practiced alliteration, and did some data analysis of poems by recording the frequency of certain letters. From here we moved on to another read-aloud, the classic Amelia Bedelia. The kids had fun explaining Amelia’s misunderstandings, and noticing the ways in which common sayings, when read literally, can be pretty confusing. As the showcase neared, everyone chose a poem or story to read aloud to you, and we practiced both our public speaking skills and our attentive audience skills. Then it was time to perform!

Wishing you all a lovely rest of the summer.

Additional Reading: if your kid is comfortable with chapter books, reading Andrew Clements’ Frindle is a good way to keep them thinking about wordplay. For more homophones and homonyms, try Gene Barretta’s The Bat Can Bat.