Summer SAVY, Session 1 Day 3, Witty Word Play (1st-2nd)
On day two of Witty Word Play, students reviewed generalizations about systems, including analyzing the elements, boundaries, inputs, outputs, and interactions. Students continued exploring what language is and how it is used. They learned how ancient Chinese writing began. In this system of writing, thousands of complex signs are used instead of letters. One fact that was fascinating to our young linguists was that in the Chinese dictionary, the symbols are grouped and sorted by the number of strokes needed to write the character. Students also really found it interesting that an early form of Chinese writing involved symbols being carved into oracles (bones made out of turtle shells and other animals). In addition to learning about the Chinese language system, students enjoyed investigating ancient Mayan writing. The Mayans’ symbols were a favorite amongst the class!
Then, our class learned how to play the game Boggle and practiced how to find as many English words as possible from a provided grid of letters. Heart and yoga were two of the favorite words we found!
We continued to explore our language system by learning about adjectives. We started by providing students with a list of adjectives to describe two mystery items. This was our segue into the purpose of adjectives since the students’ focus was on how the adjectives helped us to guess the mystery items. To continue our study of adjectives, table groups were provided with four different objects and had to develop a list of adjectives to describe each item to someone who has never seen those items. Here is an example from one table today: This object is furry, ferocious, soft, big, smelly, powerful, golden, muscular, majestic. Do you know what it is?
We also read the story, Aunt Flossie’s Hats (and Crab Cakes Later), by Elizabeth Howard, with the task of looking for adjectives in this story. We also completed a Literature Web for this story that included keywords, feelings, ideas, and images/symbols.
After studying adjectives, students transitioned to learning about the next part of speech confidently, energetically, and swiftly. Can you guess what it was? ADVERBS! Learners had fun creating roads and then using their Hot Wheel cars to practice driving using a set of provided adverbs. All I know is, there might be driving lessons in some of their futures. HA!
A HUGE hit today was taking all of the parts of speech we have explored so far this week to create some really fantastic Mad Libs! We worked together to collect different parts of speech (like nouns, verbs, or adjectives) to fill in blanks without knowing the context of the story. This resulted in hilariously absurd, nonsensical narratives, but wow, did we have a blast creating them!
We ended our day by reviewing rhyming words through a few poems. Students read Scranimals by Jack Prelutsky and continued to discuss rhyming words and rhyme schemes. A Scranimal is a creature where two objects have been combined to create a new animal. My personal favorite is the Acacadodo. Too bad they are extinct!
Some word games that I would like to recommend for playing at home include Boggle, Bananagrams, any games with analogies, Scrabble, and Wordle.