After hearing our discussion about pangrams, those sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet at least once, a middle-school teacher in Bishop, California, assigned her students to write some. They’re great! This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Student Pangrams”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Danielle Kuhl teaches 7th grade English language art at Home Street Middle School in Bishop, California.
And she does something special in the middle of each week.
She has A Way with Words Wednesdays.
Wow.
Kids can come to her classroom and they eat lunch there and they listen to our podcast.
And they talk about language and they try to beat us at the quizzes and that kind of thing.
And we had an episode a while back on pangrams.
Right.
These are sentences that include all the letters of the alphabet and as brief a wording as possible.
Yes.
Yes.
At least once.
And she sent us some of the pangrams that her students came up with.
And a lot of them are better, I think, than the ones that adults sent to us.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Here’s one from Morgan that goes,
The quick mama bunny had very good instincts to help six of her babies from getting jumped on by a white zebra.
It’s really picturesque.
I was waiting for the Z.
I was like, how is she going to work the Z into that story?
Yeah.
Well, funny you should mention the Z because that’s one of the ways that they figured out how to do pangrams was to write out words that have those rare letters like Z and Q.
Yeah.
So zebras were a big thing.
Jameson wrote, excited mystic zebras quickly galloped from the very crowded watering hole just before noon.
Wow.
That’s like the volume, first line of a 10-volume epic about Mars or something.
Exactly.
And here’s one I learned something from. This is from Anwen.
She wrote, she was flying over the sea, bumping into clouds, wishing that they didn’t look like jumping zonkeys, killer axes, and reckless queens.
Okay. So she, yeah, she did kind of the pile on of the hard letters there at the end.
Yeah.
And I was thinking zonkeys.
Zebra donkeys.
I know.
Zonkeys painted like zebras. Have you never been to Tijuana?
I have, but there are zonkeys in real life, too.
Oh, yeah.
The product of a zebra and a donkey.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
So I thought those were really cool.
I’ll share a couple more later in the show.
Pangrams.
There’s no end to the pangrams.
No end.
Our inbox will be flooded with more pangrams.
Bring them.
Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
