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The Sad Baby Cries “Aaaa”

Beginning Reading Lesson Design

By: Reilly Davis

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Rationale: Learning to read for students is a difficult task, but it begins with learning vowel correspondences. We teach in alphabetical order the short vowels first, and then the long vowels. Starting at the beginning, we will introduce a = /a/. In this lesson, students will learn to read, see, and understand the short ‘a’ vowel correspondence. Through a letterbox lesson, students will learn and use the correspondence, then read a decodable book focusing on a = /a/.

 

Materials:

  • Pencil

  • Letterboxes (six cardstock squares for each student)

  • Letter tiles (a, h, b, d, s, m, c, r, t).

  • Cover up critter

  • Smartboard/projector for teacher to model with letterboxes and letter tiles

  • List of /a/ words for spelling on a poster board

  • Decodable text “Lad and His Pals”

  • Short Vowel A worksheet

 

Procedures:

1. “We want a goal for us to become good readers, and a way for us to achieve that goal is to learn a code that will help us know how to pronounce words. To begin, we are going to start from the very first letter in the alphabet and learn the short vowel A and what sound it makes. How this works is that when you see an /an/ in a word, you are going to make the sound of a baby crying. Let’s all make the sound of a baby crying--- ‘aaaaa.’ So, from now on in this lesson, when I say /a/ I want you to think of the sound a crying baby makes.”

 

 2. “Now before we can learn to spell words with /a/, we need to listen to how they sound in a few words. To listen for it in words, think of how you say the words and how your mouth moves. When saying a word with /a/, our mouths drop open, and our tongues go down. Watch me say the word cat. I heard the /a/ like a crying baby and my mouth opened and tongue dropped down. When all these things happen in a word, I know that an /a/ is present. Let’s see if we can listen for the /a/ in the word sit. Do we hear the crying baby ‘aaa’? Hmm. Don’t hear it and our mouths don't open wide, so this means we know that there is no /a/ in ‘sit’.

 

3. “Today we are going to learn how to spell words with /a/. What if we want to spell the word mad? Like you were mad that your brother didn’t share his candy with you. To spell this word, we first count the number of phonemes in the word-- /m/, /a/, /d/. We know there are 3 phonemes which means we need 3 letterboxes. So, take out 3 letterboxes to use to represent the spelling of the word mad. We know the letters needed to make the word so take an ‘m’, ‘a’, and ‘d’ letter tile. If we listen to the word mad, we hear the /a/ is in the middle, so we know to put it in the middle letterbox. Next, we hear that it starts with an mmm sound, which we know is an M and since it’s at the beginning of the word, we put it in the 1st letterbox. and we hear the /d/ at the end, knowing that we can put it in the last box. Now all our letterboxes are filled. We spelled the word ‘mad.”

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4. “Now we are going to try and spell some on our own. We are going to start out with 2 letterboxes and spell the word ‘at.’ Like “We were at the playground after lunch.” Let’s try to spell this out. What letter goes in the first box? (Wait and listen to the student's response). What letter goes in the next box? (Walk around the classroom and observe their work). For the next word we’re going to spell, you will need 3 letterboxes. We are going to spell the word hat. Listen for the beginning and ending sounds and listen for the /a/ like a crying baby. Hat-- I wore my baseball hat yesterday.” (Try some other words for students to try and spell independently-- mat, crab, bad).

 

5. “Now we are going to read some of the words we’ve spelled in our letterboxes. First, I am going to model how to read one of the words and then I will call on different friends to read some out loud. I’m going to start with modeling how to spell a word I see on our list from our letterboxes. I see a word that starts with the letter H followed by the letter a which makes the ‘aaa’ sound, like a crying baby. So, H-a, and then we hear at t at the end. So we put all 3 of those phonemes together and get h-‘aaaaa’-t. Hat. Now I am going to call on friends to read a word from your list of words that you spelled out. (Call on as many people as there is time for, preferably most/if not all the class should be allowed to read theirs aloud.)

 

6. “Now that we have learned how to spell and read words with /a/, we are going to read a book called “Lad and His Pals.” This book is about an animal Lad who has some pals that are also animals. Let’s read to see what happens with Lad and his pals.” I want y’all to pair up with your partner and take turns reading a page to each other. Remember the crying baby exercise when trying to sound out the words.” (Teacher walks around and observes as students read together. Afterwards, the teacher reads the book aloud to the class and then allows students to discuss what happened in the book.)

 

7. “To finish up our lesson, I am going to pass out a worksheet that I want you to work on by yourselves. For the worksheet, there is a picture and then two ‘a’ words to choose from. I want you to look at the picture and figure out which ‘a’ word it is and write that word on the line.” (Teacher collects worksheets at the end for a general assessment--not graded, just assessing their progress, and understanding).

 

Resources:

Decodable book: Murray, Bruce. “Lad and His Pals” https://www.amazon.com/Lad-His-Pals-Bruce-Murray/dp/0578503352/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 

Worksheet: https://www.lessonplanet.com/teachers/short-vowel-a-k-1st

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Image: https://media.giphy.com/media/TL2Yr3ioe78tO/giphy.gif

 

Reference: Stuart, Katie. Crying Baby says Aaaa. https://katiestuart265.wixsite.com/my-site/begining-reading

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