Say what?
Emergent Literacy
Design
Marthe Schreitmueller
Rationale: Children must learn to recognize phonemes in spoken words before matching letters to phonemes. Since short vowels can be the most difficult to identify, this lesson will help children identify the /e/ (short e) correspondence. Children will learn to recognize /e/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation for it as well as a letter symbol. Practice with finding the correspondence in different words will help children differentiate between /e/ and other sounds.
Materials: primary
paper and pencils; chart paper with
“Everybody saw Eddie enter the elevator,” marker, pointer, Red
Gets Fed book, picture pages, word cards (tent, house, pot, pet, chair, and bed)
Procedures:
1. Introduce the lesson by explaining how our
written
language is really a secret code and that the hardest part is to learn
what the
letters stand for. To do that, we must learn each of the mouth
moves
(phonemes) that we make as we say words. For our lesson today,
we’re
going to work on finding the mouth move /e/. This may seem hard
at first,
but with practice, you’ll be able to spot this mouth move in many
different
words.
2. Ask students: Have you ever heard someone
say “/e/?” when
they had trouble hearing something? Sometimes, they even put
their hand
to their ear when they make this sound. Let’s pretend we couldn’t
hear
and try doing that movement when we make the /e/ sound. Most of
the time,
people do this to show another person that they did not hear what was
just
said. Try turning to a neighbor and doing the movement and sound that
show
him/her that you did not hear them.
3. Let’s try a tongue twister (on
chart).
“Everybody saw Eddie enter the elevator.” Everyone say it three
times all
together. Now, let’s do it again and stretch the /e/ at the
beginning of
the words. “Eeeverybody saw Eeedie eeenter the eeelevator.”
This
time, let’s break off the /e/ from the rest of the words. “/e/veryone
saw /e/ddie
/e/nter the /e/levator.”
4. After students take out their paper and
pencils, I
will explain that the letter e spells /e/. Get in the center of
the space
below the fence, go straight across toward the door (right), curve up
to touch
the fence, curve down and around to touch the sidewalk and up just a
little
bit. Now, everyone practice writing your e’s. I’ll walk
around to
give help if anyone needs it. Once I give you a smiley face,
practice
doing one more line of e’s. Remember, whenever you see an e all
by itself
in a word, it is a signal to say e/.
5. Let me show you how to find /e/ in the word shelf. When you listen, think about /e/ and the hand movement that we learned for it earlier. I’m going to stretch the word out very slowly so that we can hear each of the sounds that are in it. Sh-sh-e-e-e...there it is! Sh-e-l-f! Did you hear our sound? As a class, practice by exploring where the /e/ sounds are heard and seen in the words on the chart paper (beginning, middle, end?).
6. Call on students to answer questions and
tell how they
knew: Do you hear /e/ in tent or house? Pot or pet?
Chair or
bed? Go through the sentence “Everybody saw Eddie enter the
elevator”
using a pointer on the chart paper. Have students do the hand movement
every time
they heard the /e/ sound.
7. Red is a pet dog. His favorite thing
to do is to
eat. Do you think that Red will be able to get what wants?
We’ll
have to read it to find out! Read the book Red Gets
Fed. Read
a second time and have students raise their hands when they hear
/e/.
List these words on the board. Allow students to draw their own
dog
bowls. Have them write a message using invented spelling about
dogs. Once they complete their message, allow them to color or
decorate
around the edge to make their dog bowls unique. Later, display
their
work.
8. To assess, a picture page will be distributed to each student and they will be asked to circle the pictures whose names have the sound /e/.
References
Red Gets Fed.
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