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Cleaning Your Glasses with H

Emergent Literacy Design

Mary Kate Smith

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Rationale: This lesson will help children identify /h/, the phoneme represented by h. Students will learn to recognize /h/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (huffing on your glasses to clean them), the letter symbol h, practice finding /h/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /h/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.

 

Materials: Primary paper and pencil; chart with ‘Hal the happy hog had fun at the hay field”; picture of man huffing on his glasses to clean them; Hungry Hen (HarperCollins, 2002); drawing paper and crayons; words cards with hug, hat, bolt, hulk, crab, halt; assessment worksheet identifying words with /h/ (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 /h/. We spell /h/ with the letter h.  /h/ sounds like huffing on your glasses to clean them (show picture).

 

2. Let’s pretend to clean our glasses, /h/, /h/, /h/. [Pantomime cleaning glasses] Notice where our mouth is? (open). When we say /h/, we huff air out of our mouth. Notice how your mouth is open as you breathe out the /h/ sound. Try it with me!

 

3. Let me show you how to find /h/ in the word hug. I am going to stretch hug out in super slow motion and listen for me cleaning my glasses. Hhh-u-gg. Slower: Hhhh-u-u-gggg. There it was! I felt my breath coming out of my mouth with the first letter of the word! I can hear myself cleaning my glasses /h/ in hug.

 

4. Let’s try a tongue twister [on chart]. “Hal the happy hog was hungry”. Everybody say it three times to together. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /h/ at the beginning of the words. “Hhhal the hhhappy hhhog was hhhungry.” Try it again, and this time break it off the word: “/h/al the /h/appy /h/og was /h/ungry.”

 

5.[Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use the letter h to spell /h/. Let’s write the lowercase h. Draw a line from the rooftop down to the sidewalk then from the sidewalk hop back up towards to the fence and curve back down to the sidewalk. Now let’s learn how to write and uppercase H. First, draw a straight line from the rooftop to the sidewalk. Then go over a little space and make another straight line from the rooftop to the sidewalk. Then connect these two lines through the fence. I want to see everyone’s h. After I put a smile on it, I want you to make nine more just like it.

 

6. Call on students to answer which word they hear /h/ in and how they knew. Do you hear /h/ in hug or talk? hard or easy? sell or here? ham or toe? hat or tug? Say: Now, let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /h/ in some words. Clean your glasses if you hear /h/: He, happily, helped, the, homeless, man, across, the, highway.

7. Say: “Now let’s look at an alphabet book called Hungry Hen. This book is a story about a greedy fox that watches a hen. This hen is very hungry and he watches her get plumper and plumper by the day. The fox wants to eat this hen but he decides to wait for her to fatten up. By doing this, the fox gets thinner and thinner. The hen has gotten so big, she cannot make it out of her coop. So when the fox goes to eat her, what will happen next? Let’s read to find out!”

After reading the book, say: “What words from the story did you hear that made the /h/ sound? Can you think of any other animals that start with the /h/ sound?” Have each student take out a piece of paper and crayons and draw what animal they are thinking about. Tell the students to give their animal a silly name that starts with the letter h. Have them write this silly name under their drawing.

 

8. Show HOG and model how to decide if it is hog or fog: The h tells me to clean my glasses, /h/, so this word is hhh-og, hog. You try some: HIT: hit or mot? HEAT: heat or beat?  HUT: hut or nut? HAND: hand or land?

 

9. For assessment, a worksheet will be distributed to each student. The worksheet has pictures of three horses on it. Students will draw a line to help the three horses find the items that have the /h/ sound and begin with the letter h. Then, call on students individually to read the phonetic cue words from #8.

 

Reference: Erin Long, The Huffing H

http://erinannlong.wixsite.com/mylessonplans/emergent-literacy

 

Assessment worksheet: http://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/h-begins1.htm

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