Lesson

Emergent Literacy Design:

Crunch a cookie with C

Rationale: This lesson will help children identify /c/, the phoneme represented by C. Students will learn to recognize /c/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (eating a cookie) and the letter symbol C, practice finding /c/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /c/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing
Materials: Primary paper and pencil; chart with "Cory carefully crunched the cookie "; drawing paper and crayons; Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables from A to Z by Lois Ehlert (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996); word cards with COOL, CANDY, SPOT, CRAB, HUG, and CORE; assessment worksheet identifying pictures with /c/ (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 /c/. We spell /c/ with letter C. C looks like a cookie, and /c/ sounds like someone crunching on a cookie. 
2. Let's pretend to crunch a cookie, /c/, /c/, /c/. [Pantomime crunching on a cookie] Notice where your tongue touches the roof of your mouth? (pointing to back of mouth). When we say /c/, we touch our tongue to the top of our mouth, towards the back. 
3. Let me show you how to find /c/ in the word scarf. I'm going to stretch scarf out in super slow motion and listen for my crunching sound. Sss-c-c-carf. Slower: Sss-c-c-c-aaa-rrr-f. There it was! I felt my tongue touch the top of my mouth. I can feel the cookie /c/ in scarf. 
4. Let's try a tongue twister [on chart]. " Cory carefully crunched the cookie.” Everybody say it three times together. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /c/ at the beginning of the words. Cccory cccarefully cccrunched the cccookie. Try it again, and this time break it off the word: “/c/ory /c/arefully /c/runched the /c/ookie"
5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use letter C to spell /c/. Capital C looks like a cookie. Let's write the lowercase letter c. Start just below the rooftop. Start at the curve at the top. Make the first curve, bring it down past the fence to touch the sidewalk, and the bounce off into another curve.  I want to see everybody's c. After I put a smiley face 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 /c/ in open or close? Fish or crab? Write or call? Move or car? Whale or octopus? Say: Let's see if you can spot the mouth move /c/ in some words. Crunch on a cookie if you hear /c/: Cute, Candice, called, the, dog, to, come, collect, crayons. 
7. Say: "Let's look at an alphabet book. Lois Ehlert shows us all the yummy fruits and vegetables that we can eat!”  Read page 3, drawing out /c/. Ask children if they can think of other words with /c/. Tell them that they are all scientist farmers who make up their own foods! Then ask them to name some of their silly food creations like cloo-clay-clib, or cray-crunch-crumble. Then
have each student write their silly name with invented spelling and draw a picture of their silly food farms. Display their work. 
8. Show COLD and model how to decide if it is cold or mold: The C tells me to crunch a cookie, /c/, so this word is ccc-old, cold. You try some: CLAY: clay or play? CANDY: candy or sandy? CRIME: crime or dime? CLUE: clue or blue? CAKE: cake or make? 
9. For assessment, distribute the worksheet. Students are to complete the partial spellings and color the pictures that begin with C. Call students individually to read the phonetic cue words from step #8.
 
Assessment sheet: http://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/c-begins2.htm