Abby Cook
Emergent Literacy Design:
Dance in the Rain With “SH”
November 3, 2015
By: Abby Cook
Rationale: This lesson will help the student identify /sh/, the diagraph represented by SH. The students will learn to recognize /sh/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (the noise of rain) and the letter symbol SH, practice finding /sh/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /sh/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.
Materials: Primary paper and pencil; word cards with SHELL, SHUT, SHE, SHORT, SHARK, WISH; Nancy E. Shaw’s Sheep on a Ship (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992); assessment worksheet identifying pictures with /sh/ (attached to this document); crayons and paper; paper with tongue tickler “Shawn wishes he could show Sharon his new shoes”
Procedure:
1. Say: Today we get to learn a new sound! Have you ever heard the rain? What noise do you hear? We spell this /sh/ with the two letters SH. I want you to try remember the /sh/ sound as rain.
2. Lets pretend we are listening to the rain outside /sh/ /sh/. Notice the way my mouth moves when making this noise. I first close my teeth and make an O with my lips.
3. Let me show you how to find /sh/ in the word fish. Then I am going to say fish, super slowly, and you listen for the rain sound. fff—iiii—sh. Slower: ffff—iiiii—sssshhhh. There it was! I felt my mouth form the O and my teeth touched. I can hear the rain sound in /sh/.
4. Let’s try a tongue tickler (on chart). “Shawn wishes he could show Sharon his new shoes.” Everybody say this together three times. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /sh/ sound in each word. “SShhawn wissshhes he could ssshhow SShharon his new ssshhhoes.” Try it again, and this time break off the word: “/sh/awn wi/sh/es he could /sh/ow /Sh/aron his new /sh/oes.”
5. Now take out your primary paper and pencil. We are going to use the letters SH to spell the rain sound /sh/. Write an S and an H. The S is capital at the beginning of the sentence and the H is not. Let’s write the lowercase letters sh. Now you try!
6. Call on students to answer these questions and ask for an explanation: Do you hear /sh/ in shower or bath? show or tell? shoes or socks? dance or shake? Beach or shell? Let’s see if you can spot the mouth movement /sh/ makes in some words. Make the rain fall with your fingers when you hear the /sh/ noise: shut, the, show, shack, shaft, cat, share.
7. Say: “Let’s look at a book that has the rain sound /sh/ in it. Nancy E. Shaw tells us a funny story about some sheep that are on a ship! Can you all think of other words with /sh/. Ask students to then draw a picture of the words that they have thought of with the /sh/. For example, someone could draw a shower, or a shoe. Display their work.
8. Show SHELL and model how to decide if it is shell or tell: The SH tells me to listen for rain, /sh/, so this word is sssshhh-ell. You try some: SHUT: shut or cut? SHE: she or he? SHORT: short or court? SHARK: shark or mark? WISH: wish or fish?
9. For assessment, distribute the worksheet. Students are to complete the partial spellings and color the pictures that begin with SH. Call students individually to read the phonetic cue words from step #8.
Reference: Budd-Hare, C., (2014). Identifying the ‘sh’ Sound in the Initial Position of Words. Hotchalk Lesson Plans Page: Lesson Plans By Teachers For Teachers. 1.
Assessment worksheet: https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/phonics/sh-word-color_WFRTM.pdf
