LEARN NC

K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

Learn more

Related pages

  • ABCs by the week: This is an ongoing series of lessons to teach the 26 letters of the alphabet through functional skills that can be used on a daily/weekly basis building on and transferring to other educational tasks. These lessons incorporate coloring, marking, painting, cutting, pasting, creating, listening and following directions.
  • Wet your kinders' chops on the sound "op"!: Students will explore the sound “Op” with a reading of Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop by Chris Raschka and a showing of the PBS Between the Lions episode #130 “Be Bop,” which also features the Charlie Parker book and explores the “op” sound.
  • Cross-checking: An early reading strategy: Beginning readers need to learn how to bring together two sources of information simultaneously. They have to think about what would make sense and think about letters/sounds; cross-checking. Most children prefer to do one or the other, but not both. Therefore, some children guess something that is sensible but ignore the visual (letter/sound) and others guess something which is close to the visual but makes no sense in the sentence. This activity will demonstrate how to cross check.

Related topics

Help

Please read our disclaimer for lesson plans.

Legal

The text of this page is copyright ©2008. See terms of use. Images and other media may be licensed separately; see captions for more information and read the fine print.

Learning outcomes

The learner will:

  • develop concepts of print: Print moves from left to right and makes a return sweep to the next line.
  • use knowledge of letters and sounds to build a familiar sentence.
  • develop recognition of some common words by sight.
  • match words by pointing to each word as he or she reads it.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

5 days

Materials/resources

  • sentence strips
  • drawing paper 9″ by 12″
  • crayons
  • typed text for title and each line of fingerplay
  • glue sticks
  • several sponges cut into large circles
  • black paint
  • movable eyes
  • black fine point markers

Pre-activities

  • Children will need to have prior knowledge of most letters and sounds.
  • Teach the fingerplay “The Itsy, Bitsy Spider”.

Activities

  1. Write the first line of the fingerplay on sentence strips and then cut the words apart.
  2. Randomly give out the words to the appropriate number of children.
  3. Have the children with the words come to the front of the group and see if they can build the sentence by arranging themselves in the right order.
  4. Select a child to point to each word as the class reads the sentence.
  5. Give each child an envelope which contains the sentence already cut into words.
  6. The children will glue the words in the correct order on drawing paper and illustrate the sentence.
  7. This will be page one of the children’s book.
  8. Follow the same procedure for pages two through four each day until the book is complete.
  9. Make the cover on day five. Cover idea: Have children glue on the words of the title. Make a spider by sponge painting a black circle. When dry, glue on movable eyes and draw spider legs with fine point markers.
  10. Children read their completed books and enjoy!

Assessment

Children will use print concepts and phonemic awareness to “read” their completed books.

Supplemental information

I follow up this lesson plan by reading to the children The Itsy, Bitsy Spider by Iza Trapani. They love to compare their illustrations with the ones in this book, and they enjoy learning other verses to the song.

Comments

Inspiration for this lesson plan came from Month-By-Month Reading and Writing for Kindergarten by Dorothy P. Hall and Patricia M. Cunningham

North Carolina Curriculum Alignment

English Language Arts (2004)

Kindergarten

  • Goal 1: The learner will develop and apply enabling strategies to read and write.
    • Objective 1.01: Develop book and print awareness:
      • identify the parts of books and function of each part.
      • demonstrate an understanding of directionality and voice-print match by following print word for word when listening to familiar text read aloud.
      • demonstrate an understanding of letters, words, and story.
      • identify the title, name of the author and the name of the illustrator.
    • Objective 1.03: Demonstrate decoding and word recognition strategies and skills:
      • recognize and name upper and lower case letters of the alphabet.
      • recognize some words by sight including a few common words, own name, and environmental print such as signs, labels, and trademarks.
      • recognize most beginning consonant letter-sound associations in one-syllable words.