Rationale:  The importance of teaching children to learn to read and recognize words in written language is immeasurable.  This lesson will teach students to recognize the letter “o” when it’s found by itself and associate it with the short o sound /o/.

Materials:
1. Letterboxes and the letters (b,o,p,t,h,l,ck,s,) for each student.
2. A copy of “The Big Top” for each student.
3. 3 different sentence strips for each student

Procedure:
1. “Has anybody ever been to the doctor and the doctor asked you to open your mouth and say /o/?  Well, today we are going to learn about the letter that makes that mouth move.  We are going to learn about the letter “o”.  When it is by itself in a word it makes the mouth move /o/.  Can everyone say /o/? (oooooooooooo).
2. Let’s see if we can find the /o/ sound in some words.  Give me thumbs up or thumbs down if you hear /o/ in the following words: pot, tip, kettle, popcorn, lock, and cat.
3. Pass out letterboxes and letters to the students and model how each mouth move gets its own box.  “The word log gets three boxes because it has three mouth moves, l-ooo-g.  Put each letter that makes a mouth move in a box to spell log”. Then give them the following words to spell in their letterboxes.  Bob, pot, hop,(tell them to use 3 letter boxes for the first three) lock, stop, and slob (tell them to use four letterboxes for the last three). This should be taught in a small group.
4. Next, write each word on the board one at a time.  Ask the students to raise their hands if they can read the word, then call on someone to read it aloud and break the word into phonemes if they can.
5. Next do a book talk for “The Big Top” (phonics readers).  Pass out individual copies of the book to each student, have the students read the book in partners.  Taking turns reading.  Observe the students and scaffold when needed.
6. Next read the book aloud to the students and have them raise their hands each time they hear a word with the /o/ sound in it.

Assessment:
1. Give each student a sentence and read it out loud to them.  Next, have the students circle the words that have the /o/ phoneme in them.  Also, have them draw a square around the letter makes the mouth move /o/.  Repeat this with three different sentences, then collect the sentence strips and assess what the students have learned.

2. As another assessment work with the students one on one and give them some pseudo words.  Check to see  if the students are decoding by noting whether or not they can read the pseudo words.  (lop, tob, stot, bab, frod, pog).  Use one or two short a words for review.

References:
1.www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/elucid/thomasbr.html
2.www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/elucid/blairbr.html

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