Design for Beginning Reading
E's are E-E-E-Excellent
Design for Beginning Reading
Rationale:
In order for children to
learn to read and write words they must have phoneme awareness. Phoneme
awareness is the ability to recognize phonemes in the spoken language.
Recognizing
vowels in language poses as one of the most difficult phonemes for
children to
identify. This lesson will help give students a basic
understanding of e=/e/
in reading text and writing words.
Materials:
Chalkboard, chalk, chart with tongue twister written on it (Ed the
elephant was
excited about eggs), primary paper, pencils, a copy of Red Gets Fed
for
every student, flash cards with letterbox words written on them (end,
bend,
went, pest, spend) , Elkonin boxes for every student, letter
manipulatives for
ever student (e, n, d, b, w, t, p, s), overhead Elkonin boxes, and
overhead
letter manipulatives (e, n, d, b, w, t, p, s), overhead projector.
Procedure:
1. Start the lesson by writing the letter e on the
chalkboard. Does
anyone know what this letter is? And what sound does it make? Well this
is the
letter e and it makes a sound like a creaky door. R-e-e-e-e-e-e-d.
(Model opening a creaky door while stretching out
the /e/ sound.) In a little while I
want you to pretend like
you are opening a creaky door while making the /e/ sound. Okay,
2. Take out the chart that you have your tongue twister written on and
practice
it with your students. I have a tongue twister for us to practice
with. I am
going to read it once and then I want all of us to read it together. Ed the elephant was excited about eggs. Good.
Now this time when we say it I want everyone to do their "creaky door"
motion while we drag out all those e's. E-E-E-E-E-d
the e-e-e-e-lephant was e-e-e-e-e-xcited about e-e-e-e-e-gs. GOOD
3. Now you are
going to
assess the students' ability to hear /e/ in various spoken words. Now
I am
going to read you two words and I want you to tell me which one has
that creaky
door /e/ sound in it, alright? Do you hear /e/ in _____ or _____? The
word
choices are: blend or bad? good or ever? spend or rock? best or amount?
Then have your students try and think of some of their own words that
have /e/
in them. Next, write them on the board
and underline the e in each word. Finally, if they have any trouble
coming up
with their own words, have them look around the classroom for ideas and
if they
still are struggling offer some example words.
4. Now use the Elkonin boxes to do a class letterbox lesson. Hand out
the
letterbox sheets and the letters to each student and have them put the
letters
on the lower case side. The letters that they will need are: e, n, d,
b, w, t,
p, s. Put your letters and letterboxes on the overhead and model how to
do a
word. Remind them that each letterbox
stands for each individual sound not each individual letter. Now I
am going
to show you an example of what we are going to do.
Model
for students how the LBL works. Now,
let's do the word end. She wanted to end the game. Let's see I hear /e/
first,
what letter makes that sound? "e" So e goes in the first letter
box. Then I hear the /n/ sound so the letter n goes in my second
letterbox and
then I hear /d/ what letter makes that sound? "d" good job! Now
everyone let's see if you all can do a couple of words. Words:
3- (let, set), 4- (tend, shred, tent, help, dress), 5- (blend,
spend,
slept, stress). Read each word with a sentence that
contains the
word you are working on. Walk around the classroom and make sure each
student
is on task and knows what they are doing.
Give them a couple of minutes to figure out their letters and
time to
correct themselves. If a student has misspelled a word, repeat it to
them just
as they have spelled it and see if they can figure out what is wrong. If they don't correct then give them the word.
After each student is finished model the correct spelling on the
overhead and
move onto the next word.
5. Next take out the flashcards with each of the letterbox words
written
on them and have the students read the word out to you. Now
everyone tell me
what this word says. Good Job! You are doing such a wonderful job
recognizing the
creaky door /e/ sound.
6. Next introduce the decodable book: Red Gets Fed. Now we are all going to read Red Gets
Fed. Have you ever had a pet that wanted to be fed all the time? Well in this book, Red the dog begs everyone
in his family for food. Let's read to
see if he gets fed. Partner up
students and allow them to take turns reading the book to each other
7. Have each student write a message about their favorite pet while you
call
each student to your desk one at a time to identify e's in
spoken words.
Assessment:
To assess each student, I would have them come up individually and read
three
pages Red Gets Fed. I will also
test their ability to recognize the /e/sound. While they are
writing
their message, I will have them come up to my desk and identify e's
in
spoken words so that way I can make sure they have a good understanding
of the
phoneme and grapheme.
Resources:
Murray, B.A., and Lesniak, T. (1999) The Letterbox Lesson: A hands on
approach for
teaching decoding. The
Red Gets Fed,
Asbury, Sarah. http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/insp/asburybr.html.
"Icky Sticky Peanut Butter."
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