Emergent Literacy Design: Finding the Man on the Moon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Spurlin

Rationale: This lesson will help students identify the /m/, the phoneme represented by M. Students will learn to recognize /m/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (mmm like when something tastes good) and the letter symbol M, practice finding /m/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /m/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.

Materials: Primary paper and a pencil, picture representing the phoneme /m/ as an example to relate the sound to, word cards with MAN, MOON, CAN, MOM, LOOK, and MUCH, worksheet identifying pictures with /m/, assessment worksheet where students have to circle words in sentences that begin with the /m/ and write it on the line provided at the end of the sentence, one copy of My World by Margaret Wise Brown.

Procedures:

1. Begin with introducing the phoneme /m/ and discussing the kinds of words we hear the sound in. Look at the phoneme and picture example of the sound it makes (kid enjoying a sandwich). Make the Mmm sound like when something tastes good and talk about words we might hear it in.

2. Lets practice our /m/ sound Mmm like we’re eating a tasty snack. Pretend to savor something and go “mmm”. Point out where our lips are, pushed together at the front of our mouths. When we say /m/ it almost sounds like we’re humming with our mouth closed.

3. Have student take out primary paper and pencil. Practice writing and spelling words that contain the phoneme /m/ and reading back to each other. We use M to spell the /m/ sound. The capital M looks like two big hills next to each other and the lowercase looks like two small hills. Let’s practice them now. Start at the bottom near the ditch and bring the line up to the roof and bring your lines back up and down two more times.

4. Let’s try a tongue tickler. “Many men marched at the mall.” Let’s say it a few times together. On the last try let’s stop and make our /m/ sound and hold it when we hear it in the sentence “Mmmany mmmen mmmarched at the mmmall.” Let’s try it one more time but now let’s take off the /m/ “/m/ any /m/ en /m/ arched at the /m/ all.”

5. Go over the word cards having the student read the word to you. Do you hear the sound in Mice or Rice? Let’s practice with some words on these cards. MAN, MOON, CAN, MOM, LOOK, and MUCH.

6. Present the book My World and share with the student a short book talk about what we might think happens in the story and what it’s about. The book is about a young rabbit exploring it’s world and discovering new things. Have the students sound out and find where they hear the /m/ sound and share that with you.

7. Assessment: give the student a worksheet with sentences where they must find and underline the words in each sentence that begin with the phoneme /m/ and have them sound it out using the Mmm pantomime we talked about at the beginning of the lesson.