Grade A

Beginning Reader

Rationale: This lesson teaches students the long vowel correspondence a_e = /A/. It is essential for students to recognize reading correspondences in order for them to be able to map out new words. They will have a graphic to mentally tie the correspondence with representation (Grade A with the graphic of an A+). Students will spell and read words with this correspondence in this Letterbox Lesson as well as read a decodable book that focuses on it as well.

Materials: Graphic image of A+; cover up critter; whiteboard; individual Elkonin boxes for each student; letter tiles for each student and magnetic letters for teacher: a,b,c,d,e,g,k,l,n,p,r,s,t,v,z; List of spelling words on whiteboard to read: gate, brave, craze, grade, snake, glare, scrape; decodable text: The Race for Cake

Procedures:

1. Say: We want to become expert readers and in order for that to happen, we need to collect all of the tricks for reading. Do you remember our last trick in our bag: u = /u/, like club? Our next trick involves the long A sound. We will learn about the long A and the silent e that signals for the sound A to be made instead of a. When I think of the sound /A/ I think of grade A, or A+ (show graphic). Let’s look at the spelling of /A/, one way to spell it is a_e (write on board). See the e at the end? It is silent and it signals that the a is pronounced /A/. The blank space represents a consonant, or any letter that isn’t a vowel, that is in between the a and e.

2. Before we move on, we need to listen for /A/ in some words. Say /A/, do you feel how your mouth opens in an oval shape and your tongue goes to the back of your mouth? Listen to the word grade, do you see how my mouth forms an oval (repeat it and outline your lips with finger)? The long A is in the word grade. Now listen to the word glad. Do you hear the long A sound? I don’t either! Now I am going to say a few words, if you hear the long A sound, I want you to say “ayeeeee” and if you do not hear it I want you to say “nahhh.” Is the /A/ in cave, bread, grace, space, crude, screw, crate?

3. What if I want to spell the word gate? “The pig ran through the gate

to the mud.” To spell gate in letterboxes, first I need to know how many phonemes I have in the word so I stretch it out and count /g/A/t/. I need three boxes, one for each phoneme. I heard the /A/ in between /g/ and /t/ so I put it in the second box and the silent e outside the last box. Gate starts with a /g/ so I put a G in the first box. We know we heard the /A/ after the /g/ so lets put the a in the second box. Now lets stretch it out: /g//A//t/. We only have one box left and one sound left. What letter makes the /t/ sound? Right! Lets put the t in the last box. We cant forget the e at the end. We put it after the last box because it is silent but still important to the word. Now I will show you how I would read a tough word. (Write scrape on the board and model reading the word) I am going to look for our a_e trick to make sure we are pronouncing the a correctly. Now that we know this word has a long A sound, lets put the beginning letters with it: s-c-r-a_e, /scrA/. Now lets put the last sound on the end of that chunk, /scrA-p/. Scrape! Like, “He will scrape the paint off before adding a new coat.”

4. Say: Now Im going to have you spell some words in letterboxes. You’ll start out with four boxes for brave. “The cat was brave for jumping over the couch.” What about the silent e, did you remember to put it outside the boxes? (walk around the room and observe progress) You’ll need four letterboxes for the next word. Listen for the beginning sound to spell in the first box. Listen for the /A/ and don’t forget to put the silent e at the end. The word is craze, have you heard about the newest craze; craze. (Have children spell remaining words: grade, snake, glare, scrape.)

Say: Now I am going to let you read the words you’ve spelled (Show the words: gate, brave, craze, grade, snake, glare, scrape, and the extra words place and

5. grape, as well as the pseudoword frake. Have children read words as a group. Afterwards, call on individual students to read one word on the list until everyone has had a turn)

6. Say: You all have done a great job reading and spelling words with our new trick a_e = /A/! Now we are going to read a book called The Race for Cake. This story is about two siblings, Ben and Jess, who have a fun day at the lake. Their mom made them a cake and they rush home to eat it. Their dog, Lad, has other plans. Lets pair up and read The Race for Cake to see what happens to the cake. (Children pair up and take turns reading alternate pages while teacher walks around monitoring progress. After individual reading, read the story as a class and stop periodically to discuss the story.)

7. Say: Before we put our new trick in our reading bag, we have one last activity to do. On this worksheet, there is a blank to write a word and some objects. I want you to say the name of each object and figure out which one follows our trick: a_e = /A/. Then write that word in the blank. Carefully sound out each word before choosing which one to write. (Collect worksheets to evaluate individual child progress)

Resources:

Murray, B. Oh, I didn’t know: https://murraba.wixsite.com/readinglessons/beginning-reading

Murray, B. 2019. The Race for Cake