Letters
Sam had been playing with his plastic hundreds board and its number pieces when he noticed some patterns he wanted to show me. That led to a discussion about numbers and place value and question after question, until we eventually arrived at the origin of numbers. We talked about how they are symbols to represent how much of something there is and stayed on that for a while. Then he asked about where letters came from. I pulled the children's dictionary off his bookshelf that I used when I was little, and showed him how each letter of the alphabet has its own section, and at the top of each letter's first page were drawings of ancient versions of that letter with a short summary of its history. He thought that was very cool. I suggested he grab the notebook I got him recently (he likes to take notes on topics that interest him, just like the character Jack in The Magic Tree House series we've been reading) and copy some of the previous versions of the letters. We went through letter by letter, read each summary and looked at how the shape of the letter changed over time. The third and fourth images below show his reaction to learning that the letters U, V, W, and Y all started out as the same letter. A little dramatic yes, but not surprising - he's always loved letters and language. The best part of our history lesson? - when we were all finished, Sam was flipping the pages backwards as he started to close the dictionary and it landed on the M page to reveal the word "magpie"! What a perfect ending!
