- Hello, scholars.

Welcome to second grade on Read, Write, ROAR.

Today, we will focus on our big questions.

How do people study the past, and what can be learned by studying artifacts from the past?

We are going to read multisyllabic words, and find the long vowel patterns in them.

We will also listen to a story that introduces us into the world of archeology.

So, scholars, go ahead, get your paper, get yourself something to write with, and let's get ready to Read, Write, ROAR.

- [Narrator] This program is made possible in part by the Michigan Department of Education, the state of Michigan, and the W.K.

Kellogg Foundation.

Additional support by, and by viewers like you, thank you.

(upbeat music) - Hello, scholars, I'm Mrs. Z-K, and today we are going to read a passage.

In this passage, we are given clues about what someone's job might be.

Let's look at the title.

It says, what is my job?

We'll have to decide that once we're done reading, but as we read, I have another job for you.

Let's be word detectives, mhm.

And as we read the words, we are going to be looking for words that are two syllable words with long vowel patterns.

So a long vowel pattern could be an open syllable.

It could be a vowel consonant E pattern, also known as magic E, or silent E, where the vowel has a long sound.

Or it could be a vowel team making the long vowel sound.

Before we get started, let's go over our long vowel sounds.

There's the long A sound, A, long E sound, E, long I sound, I, long O sound, O, long U sound, there's two of 'em, U, and ooh, all right.

So there's different ways to make those long vowel sounds.

When we begin to read, you'll see that I've already highlighted some words that fit this pattern.

They are two syllable words, and they have a long vowel pattern.

So let's go ahead and start reading, and find those.

What is my job?

Last weekend, I was in the southeast part of the U.S.

Okay, so there's two highlighted words already.

Weekend.

Do you hear where the long vowel sound is coming from?

Mhm, right here in the middle of the first word.

So week, end, weekend, and it is made by vowel teams.

There's two vowels together making the long vowel sound.

Nice.

So last weekend I was in the southeast, hmm, do you see where the long vowel sound is coming at there?

Yep, southeast, it's at the beginning of the second word there, or the second syllable.

And it is again a vowel team, because there are two vowels together making the long vowel sound.

Well, while we're talking about the southeast is part of the U.S., go ahead and look at the map, and see, where is that compared to where we are in Michigan?

Pretty far.

(Mrs. Z-K laughing) All right, let's keep going.

I was searching for artifacts and remains from the past.

Mm, okay, so we're in a different part of our country.

And we're searching for artifacts and remains from the past.

All right, remains has two long vowel sounds.

See if you can hear them.

Remains, nice.

So the first vowel, the long E, is because of an open syllable.

Re, it ends with a vowel, that syllable ends with a vowel, so it's an open syllable, and we get the long vowel sound.

Then we have mains, what do you see?

Two vowels together, what is that?

A vowel team, yep.

So we have the long A sound here.

Re, M, ains, remains, nice work.

All right, let's keep reading.

With my tools, I was able to dig beneath concrete, sandstone, and even break bricks made of mudstone.

Ooh, that is a jam-packed sentence.

There are words there that are two syllables, and have a long vowel pattern.

Okay, it's your turn, word detective, do you see a word in that sentence that has two syllables, and has a long vowel sound?

I'm going to read the sentence a little bit slower.

See if you can hear any long vowel sounds in a word that might have two syllables.

All right.

I was able to dig.

Did you find one?

I was able, do you hear it?

The long A sound, able, able, two syllables.

And I hear a long vowel sound.

Able is one of our words we're looking for.

Able has a long vowel sound, because it is an open syllable, A, and then bull.

All right, there's more, let's keep reading.

I was able to dig beneath, ooh, two syllables, beneath.

What do you hear?

Long E, perfect.

There is a long E sound two times in the word beneath.

Mhm, let's see if you can guess what kind of pattern there is there.

We have B, what is that?

Open syllable, 'cause the vowel's at the end of the syllable.

And then we have neath.

Ding, ding, ding, vowel team.

You've seen those two vowels together making that one long vowel sound, nice job.

All right, let's keep going.

I was able to dig beneath concrete, concrete, two syllables.

Do you hear a long vowel sound?

Concrete.

You hear the long E sound, nice, concrete.

Here it is.

Ooh, and we haven't had this pattern yet.

So let's look at this a little bit.

So con, short vowel, 'cause it's closed, and we have crete.

This E isn't making a sound, is it?

Nope, it's what we call that silent E. What's happening is it's giving this E a long vowel sound.

It's the vowel consonant E pattern.

All right.

So we got, I was able to dig beneath concrete, sandstone.

Hm, two syllables again.

Sandstone.

Do you hear a long vowel sound?

Sand, stone.

O, right?

Sandstone.

Mm.

Okay.

And what do you see as the pattern there?

The vowel consonant E again, right, there's a vowel, there's a consonant letter, and the silent E. So the O has a long vowel O. Sandstone, sandstone.

All right.

And even break bricks made of mudstone.

You caught that one?

Mudstone.

Sandstone and mudstone have a word in common.

The second syllable, which is also the second word in there, 'cause it's a compound word.

And it also has the vowel constant E pattern.

There is yet still one more word that falls in our pattern.

It has two syllables, and there's a long vowel sound.

Can you find it?

I'm gonna read it again.

You ready?

I was able to dig beneath concrete, sandstone, and even break bricks made of mudstone.

It has to have two syllables.

You might have found made, but that's only one syllable.

Even, do you hear it?

E, long E sound.

Yep, and it's because it's an open syllable.

Even, yep, E is all by itself, it has a long vowel sound.

Nice work, scholars.

You have found all the words we were looking for.

Let's reread one more time, and see if you can come up with your guess of, what is my job?

Last weekend, I was in the southeast part of the U.S.

I was searching for artifacts, and remains from the past.

With my tools, I was able to dig beneath concrete, sandstone, and even break bricks made of mudstone.

What is my job?

What's your guess?

Good guess, good guess.

I am an archeologist.

Yep, someone who studies the past, and digs in the ground, looking for fossils and artifacts.

Nice work, scholars.

Scholars, remember the next time you're reading a good book, look for those vowel patterns, and then you'll know it's a long vowel sound.

That will help you decode the word, and read more fluently.

(soft music) - Hi, scholars, I'm Mrs. Fuller.

Today we're gonna be reading a book called, "Can You Dig It, Archeology Lost & Found in the Sands of Time", written by Amanda Baker, and read with permission from Panda Archaeology.

As we read today, I would like you to listen for information that'll help us answer our two big questions.

How do people study the past, and what can be learned by studying artifacts from the past?

Our book starts off with two pages of key terms.

The key terms is a text feature that has definitions for the words and the text that are in bold print.

So as you're reading along, and you see a word in bold print, you can back to the key terms page, and look up the definition of that word.

"What is archeology?

Well, archeology is the science that studies our human past through what people have left behind, like buildings, tools, and trash heaps.

Archeologists are people who study the past.

Archeologists are probably best known for digging ancient cities out of the ground, but we do so much more than that.

We study sites using the scientific method to conduct excavations, test hypotheses, and answer questions about people who lived long ago, or not so long ago.

Modern archeologists are not treasure hunters who go out and search for golden jewels all the time.

In fact, while it is really exciting to find such items, they are rare at most sites.

Archeologists are scientists, and we use the scientific method to gather information that is important for us to understand how a specific group of people used to live."

The scientific method is a procedure that scientists use to do an investigation.

So as a reminder, the scientific method has five steps.

First, you ask a question.

Two, you make a hypothesis.

Hypothesis would be your guess, or your idea on what the outcome will be.

Three, you do the experiment.

Four, record your observations, or what you see or find.

And five, answer the question.

We're hoping to find the answer to our original question.

"While archeologists are often portrayed in movies or television as knowing a lot about cultures across time and space, the truth is that we tend to focus on a field or a specialty.

A field of study is the culture, time period, geographic location, or specialty in which an archeologist focuses the majority of his or her research.

Some archeologists study the Bronze Age, or the period of time known as the Paleolithic.

Other archeologists research the prehistoric cultures of the Americas, or the people of Southeast Asia, or Medieval Europe, or even World War II.

Some archeologists focus on a particular type of study, and not a culture.

For example, a significant trend in archeology right now is called landscape archeology, where archeologists try to understand how ancient people interacted with the landscape surrounding them."

And the landscape is the environment.

"Most people would've lived close to water and food sources, the necessities of life.

If they were hunter-gatherers, who moved around to follow food, they would stay at a site for a short time, and would need easy access to shelter, and a view of the animal herds they followed.

Farming communities need access to good farming land, water, either rain or nearby fresh water sources, and materials for constructing more permanent homes.

Was a settlement built on the highest point in a landscape?

Then there is a good chance it was placed there to view all the lands its people controlled, or to protect itself from outside invaders."

In this picture, the structure is the Colosseum in Rome, Italy.

"Ancient Romans would fill the Colosseum with water to recreate naval battles.

Artifact specialists are archeologists who focus their research on a particular type of artifact, such as stone tools, pottery, or bones.

And artifacts are items left from people of the past.

The earliest stone tools date back 3.3 million years ago, and change over time.

Skilled archeologists can reproduce various types of stone tools.

Pottery specialists can analyze where pottery was made, where the specific styles originate from, and how the types of pottery used changed over time.

Bioarcheologists and zooarcheologists study bones found at archeological sites.

They look at animal or human remains to figure out the age at death, if there were diseases, what animals people ate, or what animals they kept as pets.

These are just a few specialties that archeologists can study.

One of the ways we collect information is through an excavation.

During an excavation, archeologists carefully dig layers of dirt, and record everything we find to test our hypothesis.

First, we conduct a survey, which is where archeologists walk around a site, looking for evidence of ancient populations on the surface.

This evidence can include pottery, tools, and even buildings.

There is a higher chance of finding something beneath the surface wherever we discover a greater number of surface finds.

After we choose where to dig, we plan the details of the excavation, like how long we will excavate, or if we will excavate small pits, or in an open context.

Then the digging begins.

At the end of the excavation, we can see the unique order of construction and destruction events that happened at that site.

So how does an excavation work?

It's kind of like eating a layered cake, and it relates to the Earth's geological processes.

Geological processes are the natural processes that happen to the Earth's surface.

Imagine you're making a delicious cake with four layers.

Which layer do you make first?

That's right, the bottom layer.

Then you add some frosting, and maybe some sprinkles.

Then you add the next layer, and continue the process until you've finished the cake.

You build the cake from the bottom up.

The Earth's geology, and layers of human occupation at a site work in the same way.

Over millions of years, changing environmental conditions cause different layers of rock and dirt to build upon one another.

Over time, we end up with what geologists, or Earth scientists call a stratographic sequence, or a series of rock layers.

The oldest layer is found at the bottom of the sequence, while the youngest layer is found at the surface.

Each layer tells geologists what the environment was like when it formed.

Sites where people have lived over 100s or thousands of years filled in the same way, with the oldest layer of occupation at the bottom of a sequence, and the most recent occupation level at the top.

Now imagine that you are ready to eat that cake.

How do you cut it?

From the top down, right?

When we excavate, that is exactly what we are doing.

Cutting a slice of time through a site from top to bottom with the most recent events found at the top, and the oldest events at the bottom.

When you cut out a slice of cake, you can see the whole thing from the inside out.

You see each layer of cake, frosting, and sprinkles you added to build it.

You can see the cake's stratigraphy, or layers that make it up.

The same goes for excavations when we dig at a site.

Archeologists excavate from the top down, and are looking at the stratigraphy of a site to understand the order of events that happened while people lived there.

We can tell construction events from deconstruction events, such as a fire that destroys a part of a site.

We can see in the stratigraphy when a site was abandoned, and we can even see when someone who lived at the site more recently dug into older layers to build a trash pit, or a wall foundation.

Everything we find inside each stratum, or layer, helps archeologists understand who lived at that site, and what activities they participated in.

Archeologists dig each stratum very carefully, taking note of the color and consistency of the dirt, along with what types of artifacts are found inside the context.

We collect samples of dirt layers to test for things such as seeds to tell what plants were growing, or food was being eaten.

We also collect pottery sherds, lithic, or stone tools, and a large variety of other artifacts and samples, which help us to fully understand the activities, and age of a site.

We record the location where each sample or artifact was found both vertically and horizontally in space, to map them and understand how each artifact relates to the others during our later analysis of the site."

So archeologists might use a chart or a grid like this, where they would break the site into different squares.

And they record on the chart exactly what was found in each square.

And it said that they want to mark the location horizontally.

That means side to side, and vertically, up and down, or down into the Earth.

"Ideally, the excavation continues down, until we reach either the bedrock, or the soil layer under the first layer of occupation."

And the bedrock is the rock layer underneath the soil.

"In this way, archeologists get a general understanding of the different people who occupied a site from the first people who lived there until the most recent.

Some sites are occupied only for a few decades or centuries, while others like Rome in Italy, or London in the United Kingdom, have had people living there continuously for thousands of years.

Imagine all of the different groups of people who have lived in those places over time.

Remember that cake?

What happens when we have finished eating it?

That's right, it's gone forever.

The same thing happens during an excavation.

Archeologists are very careful to make sure that they record as much information as possible, because once something is dug out of the ground, it can never go back.

And any information about its context is lost.

We wanna make sure future archeologists can access as much information as possible about the sites we dig.

So we record all kinds of information, measurements, stratographic drawings, the color of each dirt layer we encounter.

And once we collect all this information from a site, whether it is a bunch of tiny pits, or the excavation of an entire area, the data is analyzed and published for anyone to read about later.

This is the most important thing archeologists can do for future archeologists.

Do you think archeologists have always excavated in such detail?

No.

Archeology has developed over the last 150 years to be the scientific field that it is today.

The earliest archeologists were more like movie treasure hunters.

They dug through as much dirt as possible to find exciting artifacts, like gold masks and giant statues.

And they found some amazing things too, like the lost city of Troy, ancient Mesopotamian palaces, and priceless Egyptian sculptures.

However, they also lost a lot of valuable information through their destructive practices, like several layers of occupation in the city of Troy, which were lost when Heinrich Schliemann plowed through them to get to the Troy of Homer's Iliad.

Archeologists have learned from both the successes and mistakes of past archeologists to create the discipline of archeology we know today."

Let's look back at our two big questions.

First, how do people study the past?

Archeology is one way that we can study the past.

Remember, an archeologist is a scientist who digs for information, artifacts, and clues to learn more about the people that once lived there.

What can be learned by studying artifacts from the past?

Remember, artifacts are the items left behind by the people that used to live there.

And archeologists can tell a about a culture, or the people that lived there from the artifacts, like the resources that they had, the work they did, and the time period that they lived in.

So archeology is one way that we can study and learn from the past.

Scholars, if you have your paper and something to write with, I'm gonna leave you with a question that I'd like you to write about.

The question is, what would you study if you were an archeologist, and why?

So if you could be an archeologist, and you could go on an archeological dig, what would you wanna study?

What would you wanna learn more about, and why?

Thank you so much for learning with us today, scholars.

I'll see you next time on Read, Write, ROAR.

- [Narrator] This program is made possible in part by the Michigan Department of Education, the state of Michigan, and the W.K.

Kellogg Foundation.

Additional support by, and by viewers like you, thank you.

(upbeat music)