SAVY Saturday, Week 2, Cryptology (3rd-4th)
It was an amazing day of learning and growing! We started our morning with a review of the Egyptian Numeral system by creating a cartouche of our birthdate. After two more exciting rounds of “A Case of Red Herrings,” we jumped into our Eleventh Hour book.
Many of the students wanted to play a game of red herrings at home! Your students know and understand the rules. Watch out for multiple-meaning words and setting clues, and have fun asking yes or no questions to decode the meaning. Each of the “mysteries” is part of a longer untold story which is “behind the scenes.” It is up to the students to deduce the rest of the story from clues derived from answers to their Yes/No questions. Your amazing kiddos LOVE these!
Here’s a new one to try at the dinner table:
A man lives on the twelfth floor of a building. Each morning he gets up, showers, gets dressed, takes the elevator to the first floor, and goes to work. Each evening he comes home, takes the elevator to the sixth floor, runs up to the twelfth floor and he’s home. Why doesn’t he take the elevator to the twelfth floor when he comes home?
ANSWER: The man is too short to reach the button for the twelfth floor. He can reach the bottom buttons so he can go down in the morning but he can only reach as high as the sixth button so that is why he walks the rest of the way up.
Those sneaky costumed animals in The Eleventh Hour really keep us guessing! We are learning more and more with each page we decode. The multiple-meaning words, puns, and idioms add so much to our understanding of the language of the book. There were quite a few surprises today; students began to discover that some of our clues may in fact be red herrings! Our predictions keep changing, so we are encouraging them to defend their choices with evidence from the text rather than just hunches. Many of them were fooled into thinking it was Alexandra the Cat today!
During the history minute, we looked at how codes were used in the Revolutionary War to protect secrets and communicate through spies like Nathan Hale and Lydia Darragh. We learned about Morse code in the World Wars since it was one of the codes in our story pages today, and we experimented with the Pig Pen Cipher as well. Here is a link to more Morse Code activities: https://www.iwm.org.uk/learning/family-mission-morse-code
Today’s math focus was Roman Numerals, and we discovered that similar to the Egyptians, this number system does not use place value. It does, however, matter where you PLACE the numerals. We practiced game stations like Roman Numeral Bingo and War to practice this system. Can you think of some current uses and examples of where we still see and need to know how to decipher the Roman Numeral system? Talk to your students about where this is used in daily life. It was a great day of learning! The kids reported that Roman Numerals, the book codes, and the quote from Julius Caesar really challenged their thinking most.
For extra enrichment, go on a scavenger hunt in a store or your home to find Roman Numerals and decode them! Many of the kids have been asking about sequels to this book, so I encourage you to check out “The Jewel Fish of Karnak” also by Graeme Base.
See you next Saturday!