Students learn about phonics by focusing on the letter m and participating in an integrated array of activities, including reading, writing, mathematics, music, art, and technology.
Phonics Through Literature: Learning About the Letter M
Whole-to-Parts Phonics Instruction: Teaching Letter-Sound Correspondences
Students will find that learning onset and rime is a handy skill when they read the Jack and Jill rhyme.
Word Wizards: Students Making Words
The Word Wizard activities in this lesson transform phonics from drudgery into delight! Students manipulate letters to make different words.
Lights, Camera, Action: Interviewing a Book Character
Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.
A is for Apple: Building Letter-Recognition Fluency
Students apply and build their knowledge of letters and letter sounds as they play games and interact with letters online, creating their own ABC book as a final activity.
Generating Rhymes: Developing Phonemic Awareness
Traditional chants and songs are adapted to help young students recognize and generate rhymes. The word and letter patterns involved in rhymes provide a stepping stone to reading skills.
Building Phonemic Awareness With Phoneme Isolation
Students improve phonemic awareness through games and chants that help them isolate beginning and ending sounds and connect them with their written symbols (graphemes).
Multimedia Responses to Content Area Topics Using Fact-"Faction"-Fiction
Students climb into the mind of a spider in this lesson that asks them to compose a spider diary using spider facts, fiction, and "faction"fiction that sounds like fact.
Gingerbread Phonics
"Run, run, as fast as you can." Students use this refrain from The Gingerbread Man to learn letter-sound correspondence. Students use their new skills to write an online story.
From Fact to Fiction: Drawing and Writing Stories
Students gather factual information about frogs and toads to create nonfiction and fiction stories. Drawing is used for prewriting.
Getting the ig in Pig: Helping Children Discover Onset and Rime
Students will need their language-building hard hats as they construct words using onset and rime, building vocabulary and phonics comprehension.
The Two Voices of the ow Spelling Pattern
Variable vowels are the focus of this lesson; students use nursery rhymes and ow to study how vowels can change their sounds according to different spelling patterns.
In the Poet's Shoes: Performing Poetry and Building Meaning
Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" to help create a poem of their own.
Getting to Know You: Developing Short Biographies to Build Community
How well do your students know their peers? Students transform into investigative reporters as they interview a classmate, compile the biographical data into graphic form, and introduce the student to the class.
Two Thumbs Up! Get Students Writing and Publishing Book Reviews
Students evaluate book reviews written by other children, discussing their components and effectiveness, and write reviews of favorite books to record on video or post online.
Slipping, Sliding, Tumbling: Reinforcing Cause and Effect Through Diamante Poems
Writing, revising, and publishing are just a few of the tasks students will complete in order to take their cause-and-effect diamante poems from an idea to a reality.
Bingo! Using Environmental Print to Practice Reading
The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.
Stop Signs, McDonald's, and Cheerios: Writing With Environmental Print
Students use logos from everyday life to identify individual letters and then create their own captions for the images.
Storytelling in the Social Studies Classroom
People make the past come alive as students research and then share stories about famous Americans who promoted democratic ideals.
A Race With Grace: Sports Poetry in Motion
In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.