Ms. Anglim's Reading Lessons
Ride a Race Car with R
Emergent Literacy Design
Rationale: This lesson will help students identify /r/, the phoneme represented by R. Students will learn to recognize /r/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (riding a race car) and the letter symbol R, practice finding /r/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /r/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.
Materials: Picture of a race car (http://www.clipartpanda.com/clipart_images/red-race-car-clipart-47591652); primary paper and pencil; chart with “Riley’s red race car rides down the road”; drawing paper and crayons; Dr. Seuss’s ABC (Random House, 1963); word cards with RED, TAKE, RICE, ROCK, CAMP; assessment worksheet identifying pictures with /r/ (URL below).
Procedures:
1. Say: “Our written language is a secret code. Today we are going to work on spotting the way our mouth moves when we say /r/. We spell /r/ with the letter R. R looks like a racetrack with a loop in it, and /r/ sounds like a race car driving really fast.
2. Let’s get our or steering wheels and pretend to drive a race car, /r/, /r/, /r/. [Pantomime using a steering wheel to drive a car). Notice how where your tongue is, your teeth are, and shape your lips are? When we say /r/, our tongues flick up and down, our teeth clench together and our lips pucker, like we’re giving the air a kiss. There’s also sound coming out, so that means our voice box is on.
3. Let me show you how to find /r/ in the word learn. I’m going to stretch learn out slowly so that I can listen for my race car. Lll-ea-ea-rn. Slower: Lll-ea-ea-ea-rrr-nn. There it was! Did you hear it? I felt my tongue flick to the roof of my mouth, my teeth clench, and my lips pucker. I can feel the race car /r/ in learn.
4. Let’s try a tongue tickler [on chart]. “Riley’s red race car rides down the road.” Everybody say it together three times. Now we’re going to say it again, but this time stretch the /r/ at the beginning of the words. When you stretch the /r/, I want you to turn your race car wheel slowly like you’re taking a big turn. “Rrriley’s rrred rrrace car rrrides down the rrroad.” Try it again, and this time break it off the word, turning your wheel quickly like you’re making a sharp turn. “/R/ iley’s /r/ ed /r/ ace car /r/ ides down the /r/ oad.”
5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use letter R to spell the sound /r/. Capital R looks like a racetrack with a loop. We’re going to learn how to write the lowercase
letter r. Start at the fence, and draw a line all the way down to the sidewalk. Then, go back to the sidewalk and draw a curve, like the sad mouth on a frowny face, on the right side where the line meets the fence. After I come check your r and put a star on your paper, I want you to make 9 more r’s that look just like it.
6. Now, call on students and ask how they know the answer to the following questions. Do you hear /r/ in shirt o r pants? Knife or fork? Ice-cream o r chocolate? Walk or run? Say: Now let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /r/ in some other words. When you hear /r/, I want you to quietly move your race car steering wheel to show me you heard it. The words are: Several, rare, animals, run, around, at, the, zoo, every, Thursday.
7. Say: “Let’s look at an alphabetic book. Dr. Seuss tells us about a little girl named Rosy who has a pet rhinoceros. Read pages 42 and 43, stretching out /r/. Now ask the students to name their red rhinoceros if they had one like Rosy, and to make sure the name has an R. Have the students write their rhinoceros’s name with invented spelling and color a drawing of a rhinoceros. Next, ask them to come up with different items that start with R t o put inside the red rhinoceros’s room. Once they are finished, display their artwork in the classroom.
8. Show ROCK and model how to decide if it is rock o r sock: T he R tells me to drive my race car, /r/, so this word is rrrock, so rock. Your turn to try some: RED: red or fed? TAKE: rake or take? RICE: nice or rice? CAMP: camp or ramp?
9. For assessment, hand out a worksheet to the class. Students are asked to color the pictures and complete the partial spellings of words beginning with R. While students are working on the worksheet, call students up individually to complete the phonetic cue reading from step 8.
References:
Assessment worksheet: https://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/r-begins2.htm
Dr. Bruce Murray; The Reading Genie. http://wp.auburn.edu/rdggenie/
John David Phillips, Clowns Climbing with C
https://johndavid2332.wixsite.com/jdp0058/emergent-reading
