Homerun Derby!
Beginning Reader
Rationale:
Getting
students to blend sounds to make words is an essential step in learning
to
read. Once children learn all the sounds of consonants and vowels,
children can
then move on to blending the sounds together to make words. After a
child is
able to blend words together successfully they are on their way to
being an
expert reader. Blending can be taught through modeling. Modeling to the
students the appropriate way to sound out and say words will allow them
to
become acquainted reading unfamiliar words. Blending is breaking up a
word from
its consonants and vowels. You start with the first letter then place
in the
vowel sound and end with the ending letters. Knowing all the vowel
sounds is
the meat of a word and it is important for students that are beginning
to read
to understand this. Providing a interactive activity that promotes the
use of
sounding out letters one at a time will allow for students to more
effectively
understand blending.
Materials:
Poster
board and on the poster there is a drawing of a baseball field. The
field has three
bases and a home plate.
Letter
tiles
with the vowels: a, e, i, o, u
Letter
tiles
with the consonants: h, t, b, l , m, r, n, w, s, c, g, v, k, f
Velcro
for
the letter tiles
Blank
poster
board with two columns titled team one and team two
Velcro
for
the blank poster board where the completed words from the lesson will
be placed
Dry
erase
board
Dry
erase
marker
Procedure:
I
will first
introduce the poster with the baseball field on it saying, We are going
to play
word baseball!
I
will
explain to the students that when we are writing or reading words we
must sound
them out. I will give the students an example, okay class I am going to
sound
out a word and you tell me what it is. /b/ /a/ /t/. What word did I
sound out? The
class will reply and I will demonstrate again how I sounded out the
word and
how they blended it together.
The
baseball
game will be a homerun contest to see how many words we can make by
running all
the bases. All the words are related to baseball. (The thirteen words
are: hit,
ball, helmet, bat, run, win, lost, score, team, base, glove, strike,
and ref.)
The
class
will be split up into two teams. Team one and team two.
One
member of
the team will come up and draw a letter tile from the home plate. The
letters
will be in an organized stack so you must pick the one from the top. (I
have
arranged all the letter tiles on the different plates so that you pick
one
letter from home plate, then first base, then second base and so on
until you
make a word. For instance, A student would get the letter /t/ at home
plate,
/e/ at 1st base, /a/ at 3rd base and /m/ back at
home
plate to make a homerun! The word makes team.) If a word has more than
three
letters they keep rounding the bases and if it has less than three
letters they
stop at the base their on. Points will be tallied by the amount of
times a team
passes the home base.
As
the
student picks a letter tile they will Velcro it to the blank poster
board under
their teams name. As they round the bases they will place the letter
they get
next to the previous letter. When the word is completed we will sound
it out
together as a class.
We
will
continue until all the letter tiles are gone.
At
the end of
the game we will look at the different words each team spelled. The
winner of
the game is determined upon which team passed home base the most. We
will use
tally marks at the bottom of the poster board with the completed Velcro
words
to keep up with the score.
After
we have
completed the game and reviewed the words I will remind students how
important
it is to sound out words as we read or write them. Just as in the
baseball game
we must make words one base at a time.
I
will then
allow students to think of other words that have to do with baseball. I
will
call on the students to tell me words they would like to use. As they
tell me
the word we will sound it out together and I will write it on the dry
erase
board. This will allow me to know if the students understand blending.
Assessment:
As an assessment I will pass out a decodable book that has all short
vowels. It
is titled, Kids and Pets at Camp. I will introduce the book and tell
the
students to use their expert decoding and blending skills to read the
story.
Each student will whisper read to him or herself. When they come across
words
they can not understand we will as a class write the word on the board
and I
will again model how to say the word. I will assess the students by
walking
around the classroom and listening to each student whisper read to him
or
herself.
Reference:
Website-
Blevins,
Wiley. Scholastic. Bat the Ball. http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4494.
(Idea
of
baseball to form words came from Scholastic however; I changed the
format of
the game.)