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Emergent Literacy Design: The Slithery Snake with Letter S
Rationale: This lesson will help children identify /s/, the phoneme represented by S. Students will learn to recognize /s/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (making the “sssssssss” sound like a snake) and the letter symbol S, practice finding /s/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /s/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.
Materials: Primary paper and pencil; chart with “Sally sells seashells by the seashore”; drawing paper and crayons; Dr. Seuss’s ABC (Random House, 1963); word cards with SAT, SIP, MEAT, SING, PORK, and FAKE; assessment worksheet identifying pictures with /s/ (URL below).
Procedures: 1. Say: Our written language is a secret code. The tricky part is learning what letters stand for—the mouth moves we make as we say words. Today we’re going to work on spotting the mouth move /s/. We spell /s/ with letter S. S looks like a snake, and /s/ sounds like the “ssssss” noise a snake makes.
2. Let’s pretend to make the noise a snake makes – /s/, /s/, /s/. [Pantomine acting like a snake] Notice where your tongue is? (Touch your tongue). When we say /s/, we make the sound a snake makes with the tip of our tongue.
3. Let me show you how to find /s/ in the word nest. I’m going to stretch nest out in super slow motion and listen for my snake noise. Nnn-e-e-est. Slower: Nnn-e-e-e-sss-t; there it was! I felt my tongue make the noise a snake makes. I can feel the “sssssss” /s/ in nest.
4. Let’s try a tongue twister [on chart]. “Sally sells seashells by the seashore.” Everybody say it three times together. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /s/ at the beginning of the words. “Sssally sssells ssseashells by the ssseashore.” Try it again, and this time break it off the word: “/s/ally /s/ells /s/eashells by the /s/eashore.”
5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use letter S to spell /s/. Capital S looks like a snake. Let’s write the lowercase letter s. Start just below the rooftop. Start to make a little round curve in the air, then make a slanted straight line halfway down to the sidewalk and then make another curve. I want to see everybody’s s. After I put a smile on it, I want you to make nine more just like it.
6. Call on students to answer and tell how they knew: Do you hear /s/ in work or sun? Sick or touch? Smile or frown? Mist or rain? Fish or mermaid? Say: Let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /s/ in some words. Make a snake noise if you hear /s/: Sam, said, he, was, sorry, he, put, salt, in, Sally’s, sandwich.
7. Say: “Let’s look at an alphabet book. Dr. Seuss tells about a little boy whose name starts with S. Can you guess?” Read page 38, drawing out /s/. Ask children if they can think of other words with /s/. Ask them to make a silly boy name like Silly-stinky-sammy, or Singing-smiley-sally. Then have each student write their silly name with invented spelling and draw a picture of their silly character. Display their work.
8. Show SAT and model how to decide if it is sat or mat: The S sounds like a noise the snake makes, /s/, so this word is sss-at, sat. You try some- SIP: sip or tip? MEAT: seat or meat? SING: sing or ring? PORK: stork or pork? FAKE: fake or sake?
9. For assessment, distribute the worksheet. Students are to complete the partial spellings and color the pictures that begin with S. Call students individually to read the phonetic cue words from step #8.
Worksheet: http://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/s-begins2.htm
Reference: Meri Hamilton, S the Slithery Snake.
