Emergent Literacy
Christie Grover

Open Up and Say /o/

Rationale: Children need to understand letters and phonemes before they can learn to read and spell words. They must recognize phonemes before they can match the phoneme to the letter. Short vowels seem to be the hardest phonemes for children to understand. This lesson focuses on /o/ (short o). Though this lesson the students should come to recognize the /o/ in spoken and in written words.

Materials: Primary paper and pencil, chart with “The fox got lost in on the rock”, list of words (cat, dog, frog, put, spot, drag), picture page that contains the following pictures: log, bird, clog, frog, hat, and drum.

Procedure: 1. To start the lesson, I will tell the students that in order to learn to read, they must learn what sounds go to which letter. Also, they must pay attention to the move your mouth makes when you say them. Today we are going to work on the /o/ (short o). Short o is in a lot of words and today we are going to talk about some of them.
2. Has everyone been to the dentist? When you are a patient the dentist will sometimes ask you to open your mouth and say /o/. This is the short o sound.
3. I want everyone to get in groups of two. Now I want you to take turns being the dentist and the patient. The dentist needs to ask the patient to “open their mouth and say /o/ and the patient will do so. Then I want you to switch.
4. Now that we know what the short o sounds like, I want us to practice saying it in a tongue twister. Look at the chart and repeat after me. “The fox got lost on the rock.” Now I want you to say it together 3 times. What word in the sentence does not have a short o sound?
5. Now I am going to read some words from my word list. When you hear a short o in the word, I want you to stand up. If you hear a different vowel, I want you to sit down. (Go through the word list). Very Good.
6. Now we are going to read the book “Doc in the Fog”. Every time you hear the sound /o/ (short o) I want you to raise your hand. I will write down the words that you thing have the /o/. After we discuss them, I want you to draw a picture of something that contains the short o sound and then write the short o words that we talked about inside of it.
7. For assessment, I will pass out a picture page with some words that contain the /o/ and some that don’t. I will ask the child to circle the words that do.

Reference: Murray, Bruce ed., (1999) Lesson Designs

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