Zoetropes!

Last week in SWI, we had a grand exploration of the word < zoetrope >.

https://www.zoetrope.org/zoetrope-history

What does it mean, the children wondered. Why did the guy who invented this give it such a strange name? And is it related to the word < zoo > ?

Plus, this exploration gave me a chance to finally use my zoetrope kits!!!
I brought these kits all the way with me from Maryland 11 years ago.

We started by hypothesizing word sums. How might this word be built?

Some children saw familiar words inside it such as < rope > and < trope >. One child argued that < -ope > might be a suffix and gave < microscope > and < stethoscope > as his evidence. Then we hopped over to the etymology dictionary, etymonline, to see what it had to say.

We learned that zoetrope comes from the Greek zoe "life" and zoology comes from the Greek zōion "animal." This means that technically they are not related. However, as one child pointed out, maybe there's an even more ancient word that zoe and zōion BOTH come from, since they are so similar in both sound and meaning. And she's right! This is the kind of observation linguists use as evidence for Proto-Indo-European!

PIE root *gwei- "to live"

Finally, we built our zoetropes.

Then, that day's lunchtime read aloud chapter -- Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank & Ernestine Gilbreth, chapter 16 -- was all about going to the movies, so we were able to talk about filmstrips and projectors (and how old animated movies were all drawn by hand, and quite like our zoetrope strips).

And I got out an old filmstrip that I had in my teaching things from when I was 23, and they were absolutely amazed! (They want me to track down an old projector so they can watch it.) The fact that the filmstrip has little places down the sides where it was threaded on to the projector tied in really well with the dot matrix printer paper we looked at on Earth Day too!

For one of our Earth Day activities I gave the children a huge stack of dot matrix printer paper, donated by Miss Jennifer, and showed them how to tear it at the perforations and separate the pages and remove the little dotted edges. They then added it to our pile of blank paper for writing rough drafts. They LOVED it!

Reuse, reduce, recycle!

It is always so fun to see how the things we learn about connect!