- Hello, scholars.

Welcome to "Read, Write, ROAR!"

Today we focus on the big question, how do our actions affect the environment?

We will find a mystery word, read a poem about caring for the environment, And look at an example for our opinion writing.

You're going to need something to write on.

A piece of paper or even an envelope would work.

You're also going to need something to write with, like a pencil or a crayon.

Come join us for "Read, Write, ROAR!"

(upbeat music) (lion roars) Welcome, readers.

Today, we are going to solve a mystery word.

Remember, a mystery is something we don't know or understand.

We can solve mysteries by looking for clues.

The reason we solve mystery words is because it helps us become accurate readers.

Accurate readers pay close attention to every letter in a word.

Today, we're going to practice reading words accurately by looking at each letter in a word.

Let's get started.

First I'd like you to say the names of these letters with me.

First we have our vowels, and then our consonants.

Say the names with me.

E, U, Y, B, F, L, R, T, T. Do you have your paper ready?

On the top of your paper, you should write down each of these letters because we will only be using these letters to solve our mystery word.

Now that we have our letters ready, let's start with our first word.

The first word that we're going to be writing together is the word fly.

Say that word with me.

Fly.

I hear three sounds in the word fly.

On your piece of paper, I'd like you to write down the letters that match the sounds that you hear in the word fly.

The sounds that I hear in the word fly are f, l, i.

Now, as you were writing that word, fly, you might have wanted to write the letter I at the end of this word.

Because we hear the long I sound, fly.

The vowel Y can also make the long I sound, especially when it's at the end of a word that only has one syllable.

You're going to notice soon that vowels often make a long vowel sound when they're at the end of a word or a syllable.

Now that we have our first word, let's try another one.

We're going to take the word fly, and we're going to change one letter, only one.

And now we're going to make the word flu.

Say that with me.

Flu.

Like when I feel sick and achy, it might be because I have the flu.

On your piece of paper, write down the sounds that you hear in flu.

Let's change this word to make the word flu.

I hear that the beginning of these words, fly and flu, are the same.

They have the fl blend at the beginning.

But the vowel sound changes.

Instead of i at the end, this time I hear oo.

That is one of the long vowel U sounds.

Just like in fly, the vowel at the end of this word makes the long vowel sound.

Let's take flu and put it right under the word fly.

Do you notice anything interesting about these words?

When we look at these words, they are almost the same.

The only difference in these words is the vowel sound.

That's why, as accurate readers, we have to look closely at all the letters in a word, especially when it's a word we've not seen before.

Now, we're going to take the word flu, and we're going to change it.

You might need to change more than one letter this time.

This time we're going to be making the word blue, like the color blue.

On your paper, I'd like you to write down the sounds that you hear in the word blue.

All right, let's look at this word together.

When I hear the word blue, I hear that the beginning sound of this word has changed.

Instead of the F, now I hear a b, b.

And this b is blending with the l to say bl oo.

Now there's one more letter that this word needs.

In the word flu, we had a U at the end.

But in the word blue, there's actually another vowel.

Maybe you already know how to spell the word blue.

Did you add an E to the end of this word?

This is how we spell the word blue.

You might be wondering why.

Because flu has the same sound at the end, but it only has a U, and blue has the oo sound, but it's a U and an E. That's because most words in English do not end with the letter U.

There are a few that do end with the letter U.

Flu does, for example, because it comes from a longer word: influenza.

But usually, if you hear the oo, or the long U sound at the end of a word, there might be a silent E at the end so that the U is not at the end of the word.

There could be a different spelling pattern too.

Let's put blue under the word flu.

Now, you're going to change the beginning blend of this word from blue to make the word true.

Like, "Is that true?

Did it really happen?"

True.

Now, when I look at this word, I also hear a blend, but this blend is written with different letters.

On your paper, write down the letters that match the sounds you hear in this word.

At the beginning of the word true, instead of the b, b blend.

I hear tr.

I know that's spelled with first the t and then the letter R. True.

Do you see how again, in this word, we have the silent E at the end?

That's because most English words don't have U at the end.

Sometimes we add an E so that these words don't end in a U.

Let's put the word true under blue.

Accurate readers make sure they pay attention to all of the letters in a word.

If you weren't paying attention, and you saw the word blue, you might accidentally read it as true if you weren't paying close attention to the beginning blends in this word.

Let's take the word true and change it to make a new word.

You're going to change it just a little bit.

This time we'll be writing the word truly.

Truly, like I truly like working on spelling.

In truly, I know that I start the same way because I hear true in truly.

I hear the parts true and ly.

There's only one small change that we need to make to this base word true to change it to truly.

We take away the silent E, and we end the base word with the U.

Because now the U is not at the end of the word true, because we're making the word longer and changing it to truly.

Because of that, we don't need this E anymore.

Now I have true, and I just need to ly.

I wonder how you spelled the ly part.

We spell it L-Y.

You might've thought that this was the E because the Y does make the long E sound here.

Truly.

That's one of the long vowel sounds that the Y can make.

Let's put the word truly under the word true.

Now we're going to make a brand new word.

It's going to have a lot of different letters.

We're going to change this word truly and change it completely to make the word flute.

Say that with me.

Flute.

I hear four sounds in flute.

Can you write down on your paper the letters that match the sounds in flute.

There might be more than four letters, even though there are only four sounds.

This is how I changed the word truly to make the word flute.

I had to make a lot of changes.

First, I started with the letter F, f. L, oo, t. This is almost the word flute, but I need one more sound to make this U say the long vowel sound.

Or else it would just say uh in this word.

When we add that silent E, it reminds us to make the long vowel sound.

Flute.

Is that what you wrote down on your paper too?

Let's add this to our list.

Flute.

Now we're going to change the word flute a little bit to make the word flutter.

Say that with me.

Flutter.

On your paper, write down the letters that match the sounds you hear in flutter.

Flutter starts just like flute does, f f l, but then we have a short vowel sound, uh.

And that's because there is not a silent E at the end of this part.

Instead, this is a closed syllable, where we have one vowel followed by a consonant.

Flut, and our second syllable is t er.

Flutter.

Now let's hang up the word flutter.

And look, it's very close to the word flute.

Let's change flutter a little bit by changing the beginning of this word.

We're going to change flutter to the word butter.

I hear that butter does not start with the consonant blend fl.

Instead, it starts with b.

But it ends the same way that flutter does.

B uh t er, butter.

Here's butter.

We're going to make one teeny change to make our last word.

And then we're going to solve this mystery word.

Make one change to the word butter to make the word butler.

Butler.

I'm going to make the one change with my cards.

The first syllable stays the same as butter, but, and the second syllable has one change, ler.

This is the word butler.

If you were reading, it would be very easy to make a mistake and read butler instead of butter, or butter instead of butler.

Now that we've made all of these words, I'm wondering if we can solve our mystery word together.

Do you have any ideas about what our mystery word might be?

I'm going to start putting these letters together in our mystery word.

You can write them down as I move them.

And then we can check to see what the mystery word is.

This is our mystery word.

Do you know what it says?

Let's use our loop and swoop strategy to read this word.

But, er, fly.

Butterfly, Our mystery word is butterfly.

In our story today, we're going to meet an insect also.

Great work today reading accurately and hunting for our mystery word.

(bright music) - (speaks in a foreign language) Readers, it's Teacher Tan-A.

And today I have a wonderful book for you.

It's called "Coyote's Soundbite: A Poem For Our Planet."

And it's written by John Agard and illustrated by Piet Grobler.

And my friends, We have special permission from Lantana Publishing.

All right.

As usual, you know that we have a job to do when we read, because that's what good readers do.

We're gonna be thinking about a few reading steps.

Step one is we're gonna be thinking about the text.

What kind of text is it?

Step two, we're gonna be thinking about how is it organized.

Step three, are there any similar details as you read through the text?

And then step four, hmm, what kind of connections did you make?

Gonna ask ourselves two questions.

When is a detail introduced and when does it change?

As well as, when does one event cause another?

The breaking news spread like bushfire among all the animals of the rainforest.

Earth goddesses were planning a conference.

Excitement buzzed in the air, as you can guess.

The animals perked up ears, tails, feathers, spikes, horns, bristles, whatever.

There they stood on four legs, on hind-legs, on tip toe, flippers, you name it.

The animals couldn't wait.

Right now, I'm thinking about step one.

Hmm, is this a story, a poem, or a play?

Well, I think I need to think about step two to help me decide is it a story, a poem, or a play.

Let's go to step two.

Is it divided into chapters, stanzas.

or acts?

It's got three chunks of groups of words.

And I'm thinking to myself in a normal book, yeah, we have what are called paragraphs.

But a stanza?

Oh my goodness, friends.

A stanza is a group of lines in a poem.

I'm thinking that this is a poem and that we have stanzas.

The coming conference of earth goddesses from far-flung corners of the planet was going to be the first of its kind.

And, of course, the big burning issue the conference would discuss and ponder was whether humans are blind or have simply lost their mind.

The earth goddesses should have some clue, for they were all known to be very wise.

On earth they'd kept their watchful eyes down to a butterfly's silent flutter, down to the coming alive of a flower.

In the sun-blessed light of spring, down to a golden ear of corn ripening.

A tiny seed waking in a cradle of darkness.

A snail on a leaf, softly spiraling.

A mole in a deep-down burrow unwinding.

The earth goddesses never missed a thing.

Oh my goodness, friends.

Did you make a movie in your mind and see all of that beautiful imagery?

Oh, let's go back and look at this real quick.

Okay.

Where was it.

A tiny seed waking in a cradle of darkness.

Wow.

How beautiful.

Yes.

So we have a poem with stanzas and very strong imagery.

Pictures in your mind.

But even bushy-tailed, smooth-talking Coyote, who had traveled the world over and always saw himself as a globe-trotter, was still to meet an earth goddess face to face.

So you can imagine Coyote's disappointment when he heard that only the female creatures would be allowed at the historic event, not even the male earth gods, no disrespect, were welcome on this particular occasion.

Since nothing ventured, nothing gained, Coyote decided on the spur of the moment that he'd put on his wife's blue dress.

A bit on the tight side, but would surely do.

Besides, the dress went well with the toeless high-heeled shoes and turquoise handbag.

Out stepped coyote with a zig and a zag.

Mistaking coyote for a high-class lady, two ravens ushered him to the front row.

Wow.

All right, my friends, let's get back to our focus.

What's the job that we had to do?

We worked on step one.

We know now that this is a poem.

Two, it's organized in stanzas.

Three, are there similar details?

What kind of imagery did we see?

What kind of words made movies in your mind?

And then we can now ask ourselves, when is a detail introduced, and when does it change?

Well, we know that no males or even a male god is allowed to be at the conference.

But what is that coyote doing?

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," he said, and he is off, isn't he?

Yes, he's off to that conference.

So my friends, we better watch out for what's gonna happen.

What is this event going to make happen next?

(upbeat music) Hello, writers.

We have been working so hard on this acrostic.

POW.

Pick apart the prompt and plan.

O. Organize.

And W. Write.

We have gone ahead and picked apart the prompt.

And now it's time to organize our writing, friends, organize our thoughts so that we can soon be writing about them.

So my friends, we were thinking about a big idea.

And I hope you don't mind, but I came up with a few ideas, and I was wondering if you might be able to help me with the last piece of important evidence and detail.

All right, well the topic of our writing is going to be, hmm, how can I care for the Great Lakes?

What are some things that I could do that might persuade you to help the Great Lakes too?

Okay, we thought of an important piece of evidence that we often see around the Great Lakes, and sometimes in our communities, happens to be plastic bags or maybe even cans laying around on the ground, maybe in our parks, maybe even in our water or rivers or even the Great Lakes.

Then we thought, "Oh, well, we could bring our own bags to the store when we do our shopping."

So that, yeah, we don't have to use more of those store bags.

And then I was also thinking to myself, "You know what we really could do is we could also recycle all of those plastic bags that we get."

Hmm.

What do you think?

Good idea?

Bad idea?

All right.

Well, the second piece of important evidence that I thought we could use would be about that article we read about helping scientists.

And I thought to myself, "Oh, well the evidence is that we know scientists need help in our communities to make or to take care of the Great Lakes."

The next piece of evidence that we could put in our writing is from an article that we read not too long ago.

We know that scientists, they need our help in order to make the Great Lakes a beautiful place to be.

And so there are many groups and organizations that we could, I don't know, maybe become a member of and become a science citizen.

Huh, what do you think, my friends?

Writers, I need some help with this next piece of important evidence.

I know that where I live, we have beautiful parks that are right on the Great Lakes.

But sometimes, especially after a beautiful summer, they can be kind of dirty.

Sometimes people leave behind their trash, or they thought they threw it away, but it doesn't end up in the trash can.

So what are we gonna do?

So I'm thinking for this next part, we could maybe write about the dirty parks that sometimes I see.

How about you?

Have you been to a park before and have you ever noticed trash?

Yes.

Around the park.

I'm thinking to myself, if we're at a park, and we noticed that there's trash one thing that, well, I could do, that you could do, is.

Oh my goodness, I think I hear you.

Yeah, we can help pick up the trash.

Awesome.

That's a great idea.

Oh, friends, so let's go ahead.

Our topic is I can care for the Great Lakes.

Important evidence that we see plastic bags or even sometimes cans laying around in the water.

Well, we can take our own shopping bags next time we go to the store, and we can recycle our cans or recycle the plastic bags.

Another piece of evidence is that our scientists need help taking care of the Great Lakes.

So what can we do?

We can become a science citizen.

How exciting, friends.

Our last piece of important evidence is that we know that we often see dirty parks around our beautiful, our great state of Michigan.

So what can you do to help?

Well, you can just pick it up.

When we see trash on the ground, we can just pick it up and help, that's right, Michigan be a beautiful state.

I can end our thoughts by thinking there are many ways to help take care of the Great Lakes.

Great job, writers.

We have P, picked apart our prompt and plan.

And now we have just taken that planning and organized it all.

Pretty soon, it's gonna be time to write.

- [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) (gentle music)