C is for Cowboy
Emergent Literacy Design
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Rationale: This lesson is designed to teacher children about recognizing and identifying the the letter C thought the phoneme /k/. Students will learn to recognize /k/ in spoken words by learning words that relate to this phoneme. The student will practice words that use this phoneme and practice with cue words and rhymes. They will also use context clues and phonetic cue reading.
Materials: Pencil, primary paper, Cool Cars by Tony Mitton and Ant Parker, word cards, assessment worksheet, drawing supplies (crayons)
Procedures:
1. Our written language is a code that is hard for us to understand and new must start by learning the building blocks that make it up. Once we know all of the building blocks once wee add them together reading will be so fun and easy. But in order to do that we must learn those building blocks. The building blocks are the sounds that different letters make and when those letters make their special sounds. Today the special building block we are going to learn is /k/ this is a sound that letter C makes in a lot of words. First we will practice moving our mouth to make that sound. (practice making the /k/ sound out of every student’s mouth) Everyone say the sentence: The cowboy came home with a baby cow that he lassoed. The /k/ sound is made by opening your mouth just like a cowboy’s lasso would be wide open to lasso the cow. I am using my tongue and bottom jaw to push down from the top of my mouth and open it wide. He would be slinging around the rope in the air so that it would form an open circle shape in order to catch the cow just like the open circle shape of the mouth when pronouncing the /k/ phoneme.
2. We must have the shape our mouth must make down pat in order to be able to properly pronounce the word. Everyone practice touching your tongue to the roof of your mouth then opening your mouth like the lasso in order to form the /k/ sound with your mouth.
3. Let me show you how to find the c=/k/ sound in camel.The letter c starts this word so it is the first letter we will sound out. As we know each letter can make different sounds we must figure out when each of those sounds of a letter are used. Well it depends on the word. The word camel has the letter c sound the word out first since c is the first letter we want to look at all the rest of the letters in the word too for context clues. Then try to sound it out sound it out with the c= /k/ sound by moving your mouth as instructed in #2.
4. Now lets try a tongue tickler. “Can Carl the cowboy come? He can bring his cans of corn with him.” Lets say the sentence again, “Kan Karl the Kowboy Kome?” Lets try the sentence again but break down the words and sound out the letters of the words. /k/an/k/are the /k/owboy /k/ome?
5. (have the students take out their primary paper and pencil) Now we are going to practice. Writing this sound down. We use letter c to make /k/ noise. Now we are going to use the primary paper to write down this sound. Write a lower case c on the lined paper. Start at the dotted line and circle left like you are going to draw a circle but stop before completing the circle. Now for the upper case c we will craw it the exact same but make it bigger and start on the top line instead of the dotted line in the middle. Just like a cowboy throwing his lasso around in a circle we are going to draw letter c just like that. C is drawn in a circle like a lasso.
6. Next I want to check in and see how my students are doing. I want to see how much they have learned and do a verbal check to hear how their pronunciation is going. I will now call on students and read them a sentence. An example would be calling on a student and saying “Student, listen to this sentence, ‘the car is going in a circle’, do you hear the /k/ in car? Or in circle?.” Some more examples would be cake vs. share, car vs. far, corn vs. born. I will call on more students and read them a sentence to tell me what they hear. Also I will read some to the whole class and then have them raise their hands and vote to tell me which they heard (i.e. car vs. bar)
7. Next I am going tp have the students looks at a book to practice context. The book I will be using is Cool Cars by Tony Mitton. Using this book we will work on the letter c phoneme /k/. After reading this book as a class we will have turns having the students stand up and read a page. I will ask them to write down on their primary paper a word from the book using c to make c=/k/ sound.
8. Next we will practice thinking of words that use c to make the /k/ sound and make a list and practice saying those. Here I will show them pictures of the items that go with the words to help memory. For car I will show them a picture of a car and we will say the word aloud together. We ill do the same with more words such as cow, car, camel, corn, cook, etc.
9. Next we will have the assessment. I will have a verbal and write assessment combined for this. I will read out sentences and ask which word they hear the c=/k/ sound in. I will have them write that word down and then after that they will draw a picture with only pictures in it of things that have the c=/k/ sound in each word.
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