Beginning
Excellent E!
Rationale: Children with a
good foundation
of phonemic awareness need explicit and systematic phonics instruction
in order
to be able to read. Beginning readers need to know that words are
made of
sounds. They also need to know the correspondences between
written
letters and their phonemes. Because all words contain vowels, it is
usually best
to begin teaching vowels. Short vowels are the easiest to teach because
they
are most commonly found in words with only one vowel. This lesson
will
focus on e = /e/. Students will review the short e
sound,
and then they will move on to learn that the letter e, when by
itself
says /e/. Then the students will practice spelling and reading
words with
the /e/ sound.
Materials:
Class set of Elkonin boxes
Class set of letter manipulatives
Overhead Elkonin boxes and letter manipulatives (e, d, s, t, b, n, h,
l, f, r)
Class set of A New Bed by
Joy Cowley
Sentence
strip with tongue twister
Procedure:
1.
Introduce the lesson: "Today we
are going to be learning
about the short vowel E and the sound that it makes. Every time you see
an /e/
in a word, you will make the sound like your opening a creaky door. I
want
everyone to open a door, ready, eeeehhhhh, Good! We need to know about
this
sound because we use it to write different words and read lots of
books."
2.
Introduce the tongue twister to
the students. Hold up the
sentence strip: "Ok, now lets say the tongue twister together: Ester
brought
excellent eggs to Edwin.Good!"
3.
Using the overhead and the letter
manipulatives, ask the
students to name words with that sound in them and model the way to
sound out
the sounds in the words to the class. "Who can give me a word with our
creaking
door sound in it? Good, bed. Now, if I was going to spell that word, I
would
listen to the sounds, /b/, /eeeee/ (there’s our sound), and /d/."
Practice more
words using the Elkonin boxes.
4.
"Now I want all of you to get out
your boxes and letters
and we are all going to practice a few words." Have the students leave
their
letters on their boards until the spelling has been checked. Start with
three
phoneme words, then move to four and five phonemes.
5.
"Now I am going to spell back a
few words to you. If you
know what word I’m spelling, raise your hand and I’ll call on you."
Without
using the boxes, spell out some of the words to assess their ability.
6.
Using the book, A New Bed, get into small groups
with children and have the students read the book aloud.
7.
For an assessment, have a picture
sheet made out with lots
of different pictures using different sounds and have the students
circle the
pictures with the /e/ sound in their name.
References:
Eldredge, J. Lloyd. (1995) Teaching Decoding in Holistic Classrooms. New
Murray, Bruce and Lesniak, T. (1999). The Letterbox Lesson: A
Hands-on
Approach to
Teaching Decoding. The
Cowley, Joy. A New Bed. (1997) Sunshine Readers.
Anna
Ludlum : "E-e-e-egg-s in Be-e-e-ed?"
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