Many of you attended one of the sessions I ran on our PD day about the science of reading. And some of the areas we talked about were oral language and vocabulary. I am in DC for the next three days, meeting with government officials and advocating for education, but on Sunday I had the chance to visit the most amazing place...Planet Word! It is a museum that describes itself as an "immersive language experience" and the world's first "voice-activated museum." If someone had told me they were creating a museum about words, my first response would have been how are you going to make that exciting and does interactive mean you have to just go around and push buttons to listen to things? Planet Word blew me away. Everyone that stepped through the doors (bonus that it is housed in an historic school) was so engaged and mesmerized by so many different parts of the museum, including me and my 7-year-old nephew. Not many places have a short story generator by the front door! You could push a button and it would print out a short story, a poem, or a classic story on what looked liked a receipt paper! Stepping into the elevator that was full of images of bookshelves with so many good titles automatically made me light up! It was one amazing experience after another as we went through the museum. We learned and practiced several different languages. Did you know the Zulu language has three different click sounds that are part of the language? We learned about endangered languages. Did you know that languages could be endangered? We learned about language and the power of persuasion and had a chance to try to create our own ad using techniques like wordplay and twisted meaning. We sang songs and learned about metaphor and simile with current lyrics from Imagine Dragons and Drake. We played with language in the joke room and used props to guess funny phrases. We used a teleprompter to give portions of famous speeches. My nephew gave a Barack Obama speech, my brother gave a speech from The Lion King, my sister-in-law gave a speech from Malala, and I gave a speech from Oprah Winfrey. Of course my favorite spot was the library. They had framed displays where you would read a line from a book and the image would light up and a recording would read the rest of a section of a book to you. You could place any book on this special counter and it would animate the book and you would hear from the author talking about their book. It was truly magical! And there was a hidden room behind one of the bookcases where you could sit and listen to some poetry. While we can't bring everyone to DC, I thought we could learn from this museum as we continue to think about how to consistently embed oral language work and vocabulary work. We could learn a lot about how to bring language to life for kids and make vocabulary interesting. Plus, I learned that this museum offers virtual workshops, free lessons, and newsletters for educators. The virtual workshops would be available for our 3rd and 4th graders. Check out their website to see if it's something that you might be interested in. And if you are ever in DC in the future, I highly recommend visiting Planet Word!
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