Play the Drums with D
Emergent Literacy Lesson
Rationale: This lesson
will help children identify /d/, the phoneme represented by D.
Students will learn to recognize /d/ in spoken words by learning
a meaningful representation (playing the drum) and the letter
symbol D, practice finding /d/ in words, and apply phoneme
awareness with /d/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing
rhyming words from beginning letters.
Materials:
Primary paper and pencil
Chart with "Diane’s dog digs down deep"
Drawing paper and crayons
Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet by David
McLimans (Walker Childrens, 2006)
Word cards with DEN, DOT, PEER, DICE, CART, and DARK
Assessment worksheet identifying pictures with /d/ (URL below)
Procedures:
1. Say: Our written language is a secret code. The tricky part
is learning what letters stand for—the mouth moves as we say
words. Today we're going to work on spotting the mouth move as
we say /d/.
We spell /d/ with letter D.
D looks like half of a drum and /d/ makes the sound as if you
were playing a drum.
2. Let's pretend to play the drum,
/d/, /d/, /d/. [Pantomime drumming] Notice where your tongue
moves? (Behind top teeth then down). When we say /d/, we open
our mouth wider.
3. Let me show you how to find /d/ in the word under.
I'm going to stretch under out in super slow motion and
listen for the drum. Uunn-d-er.
Slower: U-u-u--nn-ddd-err. There it was!
I felt my tongue touch the back of my top teeth and my
mouth open wide. I can hear the drum /d/ in under.
4. Let's try a tongue twister [on chart]. "Diane’s dog digs down
deep." Everybody say it three times together. Now say it again,
and this time, stretch the /d/ at the beginning of the words.
"Ddddiane’s ddddog ddddigs dddown dddeep." Try it again, and
this time break it off the word: "/D/iane’s /d/og /d/igs /d/own
/d/eep.”
5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use the
letter D to spell the sound /d/. Capital D looks like half of a
drum.
Let's write the lowercase letter d. Start just below the
fence and make a circle that touches down at the sidewalk, then
go up to the roof and draw a straight line all the way down to
the sidewalk touching the circle on the right side. I want to see
everybody's d. After I put a sticker on it, I want you to make
nine more just like it.
6. Call on students to answer and tell how they knew: Do you
hear /d/ in start or done? Drive
or walk? Seek or hide? Shady or sunny? Bend or break? Say: Let's
see if you can spot the mouth move /d/ in some words. Play your
drum if you hear /d/: The, damp, duck, dove, in, the, deep,
lake.
7. Say: "Let's look at an alphabet book. This book uses
endangered animals to represent all the letters of the alphabet;
endangered means at risk of being extinct, or no longer
existing. So an endangered animal is one that has a low
population and could soon no longer exist. The bald eagle is an
endangered animal. David
McLimans tells us about an endangered animal that starts with D.
Can you guess?" Read
the D page, drawing out /d/.
Ask children if they can think of other words or animals
with /d/.
Ask them to make up their own animal name that starts
with D, like dillypotamus or drave debra. Then have each student
write their silly name with invented spelling and draw a picture
of their new animal. Display their work.
8. Show DEN and model how to decide if it is den or pen: The D
tells me to play my drum, /d/, so this word is ddd-en, den.
You try some: DOT: dot or lot? PEER: deer or peer? DICE:
dice or mice? CART: dart or cart? DARK: dark or bark?
Assessment:
Distribute the worksheet. Students are to complete the partial
spellings and color the pictures that begin with D. Call
students individually to read the phonetic cue words from step
#8.
References:
“Acquiring the Alphabetic Principle” by Brian Byrne and Ruth
Fielding-Barnsley from the Journal of Educational Psychology,
Vol. 82(4), Dec 1990, 805-812.
“Popcorn
Goes Pop” by Alle Hausfeld