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Pop Your Gum With P

Emergent Literacy
Rachel Smith

Rationale:

This lesson will help children identify /p/, the phoneme represented by P. Students will learn to recognize /p/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (bubble gum popping) and the letter symbol P, practice finding /p/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /p/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.

 

Materials:

Primary paper; pencil; crayons; chart with “Pretty polite princess in pink”; Dr. Seuss ABC(Random House, 1963); word cards with POP, MET, PIN, RAN, SHEEP, PLOT; assessment worksheet identifying pictures with /p/ (URL below).

 

Procedures:

  1. Say: Our written language is a secret code. The tricky part is learning what letters stand for- the mouth moves we make as we say words. Today we’re going to work on spotting the mouth move /p/. We spell /p/ with P. P looks like a bubble, and /p/ sounds like popping bubble gum.

  2. Let’s pretend to pop a bubble: /p/, /p/, /p/.

  3. Let me show you how to find/p/ in the word hop. I’m going to stretch hop out in super slow motion, listen for my bubble gum. Ho-p. Slower: Huh-o-puh. There it was! I feel /p/ when I’m popping a bubble.

  4. Now let’s try a tongue twister (chart). “Pretty polite princess in pink” everybody say it three times together. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /p/ at the beginning of the words. “Puh-retty puh-lite puh-rincess, in puh-ink. Try it again, and this time, break it off the word. “p-retty p-olite p-rincess in p-ink”.

  5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil.] We use the letter P to spell /p/. Capital P looks like blowing a bubble. Let’s write the lowercase letter p. Start at the fence and make a straight line and stop in the ditch. Now, put your pencil on your line at the fence and start making a circle but don’t go into the ditch! Keep going around until you touch your line again.  I want to see everybody’s lowercase p. after I draw a smile I want you to make me nine more just like it!

  6. Call on students to answer and tell how they knew: Do you hear /p/ in play or trouble? Hop or walk? Lift or drop? Down or up? Say: let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /p/ in some words.  Pop your bubble when you hear /p/. The, playful, pup, leaped, into, the, pretty, purple, pansies.

  7. Say: “Let’s look at an alphabet book. Dr. Seuss says some silly things and they all start with letter P.” Read page __, drawing out the /p/. Ask children if they can think of other words with/p/. Ask them to make a silly tongue twister with /p/ like Dr. Seuss did. Have each student write their tongue twister with invented spelling and then draw a picture that goes with the tongue twister. Display their work.

  8. Show POP and model how to decide if this is mop or pop. The P tells me to pop my bubble, /p/, so this word is puh-o-p. Pop. You try some. MET: pet or met? PIN: pin or fin? RAN: pan or ran? SHEEP: sheet or sheep? PLOT: plot or clot? 

  9. For assignment, distribute the worksheet. Students are to complete the partial spellings and color the pictures that begin with P. Call students individually to read the phonetic cue words from step #8.

 

Reference

Byrne, B., & Fielding-Barnsley, R. (1990). Acquiring the alphabetic principle: A case for teaching recognition of phoneme identity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 805-812.

Assessment worksheet: http://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/letterp.htm

 

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