Rationale: Children have to learn to blend words together in order to read and spell them. This lesson is designed to help children learn to blend phonemes together. They will practice reading and spelling words with u in them using letterboxes. They will learn to recognize u=/u/ in written words.
Materials: Primary paper and pencil; Elkonin boxes and letters (U,N,T,S,B,P,F,C); Bud the Sub; (Educational Insights); Worksheet with different objects that start with the letter u and ones that do not; chart with "Ugh- my umbrella is unable to come up".
Procedure: 1. "Today we are going to learn how we take sounds and make them into words. We will be looking at several different words, but today our main focus is going to be words that have /u/ in them."
2. I will ask students "Has your mother or father ever told you to go clean your room and you did not really want to so you said Ugh! Well that is the sound that u makes, everyone say Ugh for me. Good job." Now lets try it in a word let's say tub, now let's stretch it out and see if you hear Ugh, tttu-u-u-ub, did you hear it?
3. Now lets do a tongue twister. "Ugh my umbrella is unable to come up." Everybody say it together. Now say it again, and this time stretch the /u/ at the beginning of the words. "Ugh my uuuuumbrella is uuuuunable to come uuuuup." Lets try it one more time and this time lets break the /u/ off each word: "Ugh my /u/ mbrella is /u/ nable to come /u/ p." Good job.
4. Now lets take out our primary paper and pencil and practice writing u. You start at the fence line. Draw down to the sidewalk, curve over, and back up the fence, and now, without lifting your pencil draw straight down to the sidewalk. After you have printed one correctly I want you to write a complete line of U's.
5. Now we will be working with your letterboxes. Each box stands for only one phoneme and a phoneme is a vocal gesture. Lets do the word up (I will have two boxes set out) someone come and do the word up for me. We will do the following words: nut, sub, put, fun, cup, tub, and bus.
6. Now the students will read Bud the Sub. After reading the story they will draw a submarine and inside it write all the words that had a u in them.
7. For assessment, I will have the children look at a worksheet with different pictures and circle the pictures that start with u and put an X over the ones that do not start with u.
Reference: Eldredge, J. Lolyd. (1995). Teaching Decoding in Holistic Classrooms. Prentice-Hall. 1995

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