Grade 2 Word Detectives at Nueva Investigate the Days of the Week Grade 2
Reformatted from the class blog of Sam Modest & Erin Metcalf
We kicked off our year of Word Study this past week with a
close investigation of a family of words that we see everyday,
but perhaps don't think about very deeply: the days of the
week. The Word Detectives started off with some quiet
investigation time on their own, noting any interesting patterns,
anomalies, and questions that arose when they looked closely
at these words...
We also discovered that the Germanic peoples of northern
Europe borrowed this structure from the Romans and inserted
their own gods into the days of the week. So, for example,
while <Tuesday> in Latin is named after Mars, the god of war,
in the early Germanic language it was named after Tiw, their
god of war. And thus, we have "Tiw's day," or <Tuesday>! <Sunday>
<Monday>
<Tuesday>
<Wednesday>
<Thursday>
<Friday>
<Saturday>
We then explored some of their questions and
observations, which yielded some incredibly rich
results! As a team of detectives, we explored three questions that
arose from our independent investigation…
• Is <Sunday> connected to the sun? And is <Monday>
connected to the moon?
• Is <day> a suffix or a base?
• If <day> is a base, then is <Wednes> a prefix, a free base,
or a bound base?
From a combination of these questions and some background
research using etymological sources, we learned that
<Sunday> refers to the sun, <Monday> is dedicated to the
moon, and that all of the days of the week are named after
gods. In Latin, each celestial body (the sun, moon, and each
planet) is named after a god, and each day of the week is
named after one of those gods. Similarly, we have "Woden's day" for <Wednesday>, "Thor's
day" for <Thursday>, and "Friga's day" for <Friday>. The
northern Europeans did not have an equivalent god for Saturn,
the Roman god of old age, so they kept <Saturday> (the oldest
day of the week).
Notes:
• These lessons grew from studying Real Spelling Tool Box
Theme 2L: “Naming the days of the week”
• Sam added that in the week following this lesson, the
students decided that the spelling of the days of the week is
not not just based the sounds of the words, but also on their
origins and meanings. What a generative lesson to have
learned. Imagine what is lost when children are taught to
mispronounce a word like <Wednesday> in order to
memorize its spelling...