SAVY Saturday, Week 1, Cryptology (3rd-4th)
Welcome to Cryptology, where we are finding and deciphering codes all around us! It was an exciting first day as we got to know each other and built some of our classroom routines, including playing “A Game of Red Herrings” and greeting each other daily in a morning meeting. Building a community of learners where we are safe to take intellectual risks and persevere in the face of difficult problems is an essential part of our success this Spring!
We are off to a great start, beginning to form our initial impressions about who stole the feast in our “Eleventh Hour” text, which was the focus of our morning time together. We learned today that Horace is having an 11th Birthday Party on November 11th. He invited 11 guests, and when it was time to eat the feast at 11:00, the feast was gone! We’ve discovered who the characters are and heard their alibis. I encourage you to ask your child who they predict may have done it at this point. Each illustration is putting our codebreaking skills to the test!
After lunch, students learned about the Caesar Cipher today, both its historical connections and how to decode one. They are bringing home a decoder wheel that can be used to write and create their own codes. Our math focus for today was on our base ten system, as well as the Egyptian Numeral system which does not have place value like ours. We did some formative assessment on the Base Ten system before teaching the Egyptian Numerals. They struggled with how tough it was to draw those symbols, and we talked about why this system is not something used today. We finished with a “scoot” solving some Egyptian numerals and converting them to base ten.
EXTENSION IDEA: Ask your child how to write their birthdate (including the year) using the Egyptian Numeral System as their code. See you next Saturday for another great day of learning!