ETYKIDS

Are you wondering where our winter holidays come from? There are many holidays people celebrate this time of year, but three common ones are Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Haunuka. Lets jump into these fascinating holiday words and their meanings!

First, let's look at Christmas! Christmas is a Christian holiday held on December 25. The word comes from Old English, and splits into the parts “christ”, which means “anointed one” and “mass”, which means “mother.” Sometimes people abbreviate the word Christmas to Xmas because “X” in the Greek alphabet means “chi” like in “christ”. Now that we know about Christmas, let's look into Hanukkah!

Hanukkah is a Jewish celebration that lasts eight days. On each night you light a menorah which is a candle that has eight branches. Hanukkah comes from a Hebrew verb, that means “to dedicate.” Hanukkah is dedicated to the miracle of light. The Hebrew word for Hanukkah looks like this in its original Jewish script:

Kwanzaa is about the miracle of life that's celebrated by African Americans. It comes from Kiswahili. Like in Hanukkah, you light a candle. But this candle has seven branches and is called a kinara. An extra -a was added to the end of Kwanzaa so that it had seven letters to symbolize the seven candles. Matunda ya kwanza was the phrase that Kwanzaa comes from. Matunda ya kwanza means “first fruits.”

I think by now we’ve covered what you need to know about the etymology of these holidays. I hope learning about them was interesting and helpful to you! Now you’ll understand all three of these. I wish you a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, and a joyous Kwanzaa!

by Jocelyn P.

Hello!

Welcome to our very first blog post! We are a mixed class of 4th and 5th graders at Klondike Elementary in Indiana and we LOOOOOVVVVVEEE etymology and morphology! Every week, we practice deciphering the literal definitions of words. We get a new root every week, then we name a bunch of words that have the root in them, and find out what all the roots and affixes mean. We love answering questions, and doing stuff that is considered weird for a classroom. (One year we even saved ducks whose siblings were eaten by a murder of crows (literally murder)! We raised them, then had to send them to a duck owner.) We thought “Well, we’ve already saved ducks, so why don’t we make a blog about etymology?” We did a lot of preparing and studying to get ready for our first post!

Not only do we like weird things, we also love a challenge. And, we also thought that any person like us who is interested in the study of words and their meaning could check out our blog for fun facts. Our entire class is hard at work creating blog posts in their free time. It is such a fun project, and our writing skills are improving as we go.

Ask anyone in our class, and they’ll tell you what an amazing teacher Mrs. Minogue is, and how nobody could ever make etymology as fun as she can. We think that our informational blog posts will be enjoyed by all ages. Here are some things our classmates said about what they learned about etymology this year:

Our classmate Danae stated, “I learned etymology is the story behind the words. I also learned what bound morphemes and free morphemes mean.”

“Writing this blog helped me understand topics I didn’t know in the first place,” replied Jocelyn.

“That you can split apart words and find out the meanings by the word parts,” answered Eden. “Before I was in Mrs. Minogue’s class, I thought that each word meant something and that was it.”

Here are some things our class said they were looking forward to about our blog:

“I am most excited to make cool and interesting blog posts to share with lots of people,” Vesper replied.

Mrs. Minogue told us, “I am excited for my students to be excited! I love seeing their passion for words and their desire to make something authentic- to share their learning with the world!”

Garrett told us, “I am looking forward to posting and seeing our blog outside of school.”

“It will be fun and it will feel like we are professionals!” Martin exclaimed.

“We can teach people about etymology!” Asher explained.

We hope this blog will improve and grow our etymology and morphology skills and maybe improve yours too! Don't forget to check out our other pages in the top right menu. We hope you enjoy our blog posts, and learn something fun and new. Learn on!

by Mrs. Minogue's Class