Summer SAVY, Session 1 Day 2, Witty Word Play (1st-2nd)
In the morning of day two, students reviewed the generalizations about systems. As linguists, students applied what we learned yesterday about the Sumerians and cuneiform by creating their own “clay tablets”. They used model magic clay (which represented the clay stone) and both a chopstick and a pencil (to represent the reed) to make impressions of the symbols that they selected to make on their clay. This activity was a big hit with all of the students! Can you try to figure out what they were communicating with their symbols?
We continued our day exploring what language is and how it is used. The story, The War Between the Vowels and the Consonants, by Priscilla Turner, helped us to realize that vowels and consonants depend on each other to form words. Students were challenged to make words with only consonants or only vowels and discovered that the majority of words need both. We came back to our overarching concept of systems to compare and contrast our language system to yesterday’s terrarium system. Students did a great job noticing that both systems include inputs, outputs, interactions, boundaries, and a variety of elements.
As our day continued, our young linguists analyzed what makes a sentence and discovered patterns in sentences. Students helped me realize that my sentence “running. Cat The is” just didn’t make sense. Our language system has rules that help us know the order of words. We read a few books about nouns and verbs, including Nouns and Verbs Have a Field Day by Robin Pulver. We wrapped up our day by completing a Literature Web for this main story that included key words, feelings, ideas, and images/symbols that we created in our minds.
