- Hello, readers and writers.

Welcome to second grade on "Read, Write, Roar".

Today, we're going to focus on two big questions.

How do people study the past?

And what can be learned by studying artifacts from the past?

Maybe we'll find out as we interview an archaeologist who is also an author.

We are going to be writing some poetry today and working with words that are plural and they're also connected to archaeology.

Hmm, scholars, go ahead and get some paper, something to write with, and let's get ready to read, write, roar.

- [Announcer] 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.

(uplifting music) - Hi scholars.

I'm Mrs. Z-K. And today we are going to be working with some multi-syllabic words.

Multi-syllabic just means that the word will have more than one syllable.

For example, cat has one syllable, (clapping) cat.

But if we talk about a donkey, donkey has two syllables.

So when there is more than one syllable, it's called a multi-syllabic word.

Our words also are nouns that relate to archaeology in some way.

What's a noun?

I'm sure you know.

A noun is a person, a place, or a thing and things is a really wide category.

Yeah.

So I am going to sort the words based on the color of the paper the word is written on.

So we will read the word, count the syllables, and then I am going to sort them based on the color of the paper.

Hopefully at the end, you'll be able to tell what category title should go above each set of words.

Are you ready, scholars?

Yeah, it'll be fun.

All right, let's go with our our first word.

Our first word is O, shins.

Oceans.

Do you notice that there is a S at the end of the word ocean?

Mm-hm.

What does that S mean?

That S is indicating that there is more than one ocean.

Just like we're talking about more than one syllable, right?

There's more than one ocean, that is called plural.

Say plural.

Yeah.

All of our words today are going to have an S at the end to show that they are more than one, a plural form.

This word is oceans.

Can you clap that out?

(clapping) Nice.

How many syllables?

Two, correct.

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and put this in the yellow category.

All right, scholars, here's our next word.

Let's go ahead and repeat after me, I'm gonna chunk the word up.

You got mon, U, ments.

Put it together.

Monuments, nice.

Monuments are sculptures or statues of some sort representing heritage.

Now again, we have the S at the end meaning we're talking not just about one monument but about more than one, monuments.

Go ahead and clap that out and see how many syllables there are.

(clapping) Three.

Nice work.

I'm gonna go ahead and put this one in the green category.

All right, scholars, you ready?

We'll keep it going.

We have treas, ures.

What word?

Treasures.

Not just one treasure, but treasures.

Go ahead and clap that out.

(clapping) And there are?

Two syllables, nice work.

That's also going here in our green category.

Ooh, another green one, all right.

I know I'm gonna split right here between my two consonants.

I see there's a S at the end, meaning it's plural.

All right, repeat it after me.

We got fos, sils, fossils, nice work.

Fossils are things that are dug up, remains, like remaining bones of something that was once before living.

Mostly we talk about dinosaur fossils, right?

It's pretty cool stuff.

All right, go ahead and clap that out.

(clapping) How many syllables?

Two, fossils.

All right, next word.

All right, so I'll chunk it up, you repeat after me.

Let's figure out what this word is.

We got mu, se, ums.

Museums are so awesome.

All right, go ahead and clap it out.

How many syllables?

(clapping) What'd you get?

Three, nice work, museums.

All right, moving on.

Here's our next word.

All right, I'll chunk it up.

We have sci, en, tists.

What word?

Scientists, nice work.

Not just talking about one scientist, but scientists, and that is plural.

And a scientist is someone who does science, right?

All right go ahead and clap that out.

How many syllables?

(clapping) Three, correct.

All right, this is our first orange category word.

All right, scholars, our next word.

Repeat after me.

We have pyr, a, mids.

What's our new word?

Pyramids, nice.

And we're not just talking about one, it's plural and there are pyramids in Egypt.

Yeah, kinda look like mountains, but real big triangles.

All right, go ahead and clap this word out.

How many syllables do you hear?

(clapping) Three, nice work.

I'm gonna keep this in our yellow category.

All right, scholars, here's our next word.

All right, after me ob, serve, ers.

Observers, nice job.

And observers are the people who observe.

So it's the people who are watching or people who are observing something over a period of time.

You might call them observers.

All right, scholars, our last word.

And of course we had to have this word 'cause all of these were based off of archaeology.

All right, after me, ready?

We got ar, chae, ol, o, gists.

(giggling) That was a hard one.

Archaeologists, and these are people who are studying archaeology.

All right, so go ahead and try to clap that out on your own.

See if you can hear how many syllables there are.

(clapping) Archaeologists.

What'd you get?

Five, ding, ding, ding.

(giggling) Archaeologists is a long word.

All right, scholars, we have done it.

Should we go back and read through the words?

Let's do it per group and see if you can figure out what's the title of this group?

Hmm, let's start here.

We have scientists, observers, and archaeologists.

Hmm, what do you think?

One thing I noticed is that when I was telling you what each of these words meant, I was saying it's someone who.

Someone who does this thing.

Does that give you a clue?

It's talking about people.

Absolutely.

These are all different kinds of people or maybe the same person who is a scientist studying archaeology and observes things.

All right, scholars, let's go to our next one.

You ready to read with me?

All right, we have oceans, museums, and pyramids.

We could go to the ocean.

We could go to museums and we could go to the pyramids.

What do you guys think?

These are all places we could go, right?

Oh, are you starting to get to get the pattern here?

We have a category for people, a category for places.

Let's read our last group of words.

We have monuments, treasures, and fossils.

Remember monuments were those statues or sculptures.

Treasures?

That could be a multitude of things.

And then fossils, things like bones.

Things, did you hear me say it?

These are all different things that relate to archaeology.

Remember I gave you a big clue in the beginning that these words were all nouns.

They are either people, places, or things.

Scholars, nice work.

As you read or write at home, why don't you think about the words that you're writing and what kind of nouns you're using?

Are they people, places, or things?

Are you adding S's at the end of your word?

Are you talking about one thing or more than one thing?

Are they plural?

Are your words just one-syllable words or are they multi-syllabic words like we worked with today?

You're reading really big words.

That's awesome, scholars.

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

Today, we're gonna be talking to a special guest.

Joining us today is archaeologist and author, Amanda Baker.

Amanda is the author of the book, "Can YOU Dig It?

Archaeology Lost and Found in the Sands of Time".

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

How do people study the past?

And what can be learned by studying artifacts from the past?

Joining us today is my friend, Amanda Baker, author of the book, "Can YOU Dig It?

Archaeology Lost and Found in the Sands of Time."

Welcome, Amanda.

- Hi, how are you?

- Good, how are you?

- I'm doing well.

- Good.

Amanda is an archaeologist, educator, and enthusiast of all things related to past cultures.

Her mission is to encourage children to have a passion for learning and exploring the world around her.

Tell us about your job as an archaeologist.

- I currently work at a cultural resource management firm, CRM for short.

And what that means is we go out ahead of certain projects where they're gonna be digging in the ground.

So if they're building a new road or if they're putting in your internet cables or something like that, we go out and we search the ground and make sure that there aren't any archaeological sites that are there.

If there are, we record them and report them to the state and different federal agencies so that everybody's aware of the fact that these sites exist.

And then we work with our clients and with these agencies to make sure that these sites are avoided and they're protected.

Some of the most common sites that we find out here in North Dakota are Native American sites.

And so we find things like stone feature sites.

We have stone circles and cairns.

Stone circles are locations where there's sometimes spiritual sort of activities related to what's happening with these features.

They're also used for when tepees were out there, they would put the stones around the edge of the tepee to hold it down.

So we find those traces sometimes in stone circles.

We also have cairns, which are where you can find burials.

Out here, we also near the rivers have earthlodge village sites where you can find really neat things.

We have pottery, and this is cord-impressed pottery where somebody took a rope while the clay was wet and they pressed it into the clay to make the designs.

We also find things like stone tools.

So this is a partial projectile point.

We also find things, this is pretty neat, a game piece where you can see that they've made little cuts into the bone here for whatever game they were playing at the time.

And then while we're out here in North Dakota, we also find historic sites which record the time from when European Americans came in westward expansion of the US.

And we find things like this, which is a glass insulator.

You would find these on telephone lines and electric lines and the wires would go through them to protect and conduct but make sure that the electricity wasn't gonna cause a fire in the lines that they're using.

I also have of a lock here with an Eagle on that.

And so we find just things from everyday life.

And a site, a site is anything over 50 years old.

So you could be in a building right now that is actually an archaeological site just waiting to be recorded.

- Where have you explored or excavated?

- I am really excited to say I was able to excavate in Greece on a site called Deskalio.

And this is a site that's about 5,000 years old.

And people from all of the islands in Greece would come together to this one site to meet and have feasts and celebrate and do all kinds of fun things.

And I've also been able to visit sites in the United Kingdom, in Italy, and here in the US.

So I've been able to go to places like Cahokia, down in St. Louis.

And I also spend a lot of time at sites around here that we call earthlodge village sites where Native Americans used to live.

- What artifacts or clues about past cultures have you found?

- There are definitely some things that we look for where we expect good locations for site, where we might find sites.

And one of the good indicators is if there's a nearby source of water, because all people need water.

So one of the places that we'll look are along streams and places where rivers might diverge, where creeks run off, places like that.

And that's where these earthlodge village sites are.

They're all along the Missouri River here in North Dakota.

- When did you know you wanted to be an archaeologist?

- I knew from a pretty young age that I wanted to be an archaeologist.

When I was probably in second or third grade, I read a book about a town called Pompeii in Italy, which is where a big eruption, volcanic eruption happened in around 79 AD and the entire city was buried underneath volcanic ash.

And later people found the site and have been excavating it ever since.

And the entire city is basically as it was the day that people left during the volcanic eruption.

And so from the time that I first read about that, I really was interested in archaeology and learning about how other people used to live.

And so that's when I knew.

- Tell us about being an author and how you came up with the idea for your book.

- Absolutely.

Because I was inspired as a kid, one of the things that I wanted to do with this book was to kind of have a more modern approach to how we do archaeology now.

There are a lot of stories out there about how archaeology has always been done, where people go out and they search for this stuff.

But I wanted to show the more scientific approach that we use and I wanted to make it accessible to kids like me for when I was that age to maybe become interested and excited in archaeology themselves.

- One thing I really liked about your book is as we're reading, you have lots of pictures that match up with the story.

- Yes.

The pictures, I think, tell the story.

Because it's all about what we see, all about what we feel, all about what we experience.

And archaeology is a science that uses all of these different senses and recording tools for us to be able to experience how people used to live.

It's a really interesting feeling to be standing next to a wall that nobody has seen for 5,000 years.

And just knowing that people used to walk by here every day or they slept in this room here.

And there's something very interesting and exciting about that.

And so the pictures, I think, help tell that story pretty well.

- Where can we learn more about archaeology?

- There are so many places.

One of the things you can do is you can go online and there are different sites that have different activities and different things you can read about.

I highly recommend going to a library and just looking up more books.

You can find a place that you're interested or a type of thing that you're interested in and just keep reading more and more about that.

You can also actually go visit archaeological sites where you live.

So there's a good chance that there are several near you.

So you can take a weekend and go visit some sites.

You can also find places to participate in archaeological digs as the community.

There are lots of people out there who like having the help, they like working with kids, they enjoy teaching.

And so you can actually go and participate in excavations, as well.

And then, of course, you can go to my website, Pandaarchaeology.com and find some activities and articles there, as well.

- Amanda, it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Thank you so much for being on our show.

- Thank you so much for having me, it's been fun.

(uplifting music) - It was a lot of fun to meet Amanda today and learn more from her about her job as an archaeologist and an author.

We're gonna be authors today, scholars, and we're gonna learn to write a type of a poem called a cinquain.

A cinquain is a type of a poem that has five lines.

The first line of the poem has just one word and that word has to be a noun.

That means it's a person, place, or thing.

The second line of our poem has two words and those two words describe the noun, or describe the first word of our poem.

And a describing word is an adjective.

Line three, three words that show action.

So we need three verbs or action words ending in an I-N-G. Line four of our poem has how many words?

You guessed it, four.

Four words that describe feelings or more about the noun, so it's a phrase or a statement about the noun.

Line five, another word for the noun.

So it also has one word and that word is a synonym or a word that means the same as a noun or the same as the first word in our poem.

I wrote a poem that I want us to take a closer look at.

We'll read my poem and then we'll go back and we'll look at the poem and make sure it has all the pieces.

So my cinquain is author.

Creative, knowledgeable.

Sharing, telling, writing.

Talks to the reader.

Storyteller.

So the first line of my poem needs to be a noun, person, place, or thing, one word.

Author.

The second line needs to be adjectives or describing words that describe an author.

An author is creative and knowledgeable.

The third line needs to be three verbs or action words ending in I-N-G. An author is sharing, telling, and writing.

Line four is four words that tell more information about being an author.

Talks to the reader.

And the last line is one word, a word that means the same or a synonym for author.

And I said that an author is also a storyteller.

We're gonna write our own poem and we're gonna write it about an archaeologist.

So the one word or the noun that I'm gonna use for my first line is archaeologist.

Now we need two words that describe the noun or adjectives.

Good, I heard you say careful because archaeologists need to be careful as they dig in the dirt.

And I heard curious.

I'm gonna put a comma in between because it's a list.

Archaeologist, careful, curious.

Now we need three words that show action or show what an archaeologist is doing.

They need to be verbs that end in I-N-G.

I like those.

I heard digging, collecting, and discovering.

Let's write that.

Digging.

And I'm gonna put a comma between these because they're a list.

Digging, collecting, discovering.

Now we need a four-word phrase that tells us something about an archaeologist.

They do look for things from the past, so I'm gonna write, "They study the past."

They study the past.

For our last line, we need one word that's a synonym or a word that means the same thing as archaeologist.

And an archaeologist is a scientist because they're exploring and discovering.

All right, let's go ahead and read our poem together.

Archaeologist.

Careful, curious.

Digging, collecting, discovering.

They study the past.

Scientist.

I have two more cinquains that I'd like us to read together.

Excavation, that deals with our subject of an archaeologist.

So excavation, underground, dirty.

Digging, looking, finding.

Archaeologists dig for artifacts.

Mission.

'Cause they're on a mission to find something.

The last poem is about artifacts.

Artifacts, old, buried.

Hiding, waiting, telling.

Objects from the past.

Relic.

A relic is another word for something that's old.

Thank you so much for learning with us today, scholars, and practice making cinquains at home.

Use your imagination and think of some different words that you could write a poem about.

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

- [Announcer] 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)