SAVY 2019: Session 5, Day 1 – Witty Wordplay (Rising 1st/2nd)
What is a word? How did people communicate before words, letters or symbols were created? We began our day pondering these questions. We decided that a word is something that is made up of letters that form words and are organized to make sense that can also be from different countries. We also thought that some letters can be placed together that don’t make sense. Then we looked closely at cave paintings and Hieroglyphs, and tried to tell stories from just the symbols and we were able to tell what the authors were intending to relay to those who looked at them. From this point, we created our own symbols to relay a message to our peers. We walked around the room to see if our friends could decipher what we were trying to say with our symbols. This was a lot of fun and for the most part, we could understand the message without words.
What happens when words are created with letters that don’t make any sense? We read a D. Seuss book called, On Beyond Zebra, and discover the world of Wacky Words! We had great fun with words such as wumbus, swampf, glikker, and thnaders. Then we chose a wacky word, Floob-Bloober-Bab-Boober-Bubs, divided into two groups and wrote a story based on this wacky word! When we were finished, each group read their story and everyone enjoyed the wacky stories!
We learned how to do Word Ladders (using clues to change words to make different words while climbing a ladder of changing words). This was new to all, so it was a lot of fun to try to decipher the clues and change the letters to make the next word. We will be doing these each morning as a warm up. Next, we read a book called Word Wizard to practice seeing how word pairs in text can have the letters scrambled to make new words, such as dawn-wand, pat-tap, flea-leaf and star-arts. After practicing with the words in the book, we wrote our own word-pairs in our writer’s journals and shared them with the group.
We started reading a short novel called Donavan’s Word Jar. The main character in this book doesn’t collect the usual things that other kids collect such as rocks, baseball cards, stamps, or coins. Donovan collects big words that interest him and he places them in a word jar. We are on a quest to do the same, so our young writers will be on the lookout at school and at home for big words to share with the class and to place on our new word chart. We will also have word jars at our table groups! This has been a fabulous first day!
Ms. Tyson
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