Fishing for beginning sounds

This lesson introduces the beginning sounds for picture words.

A lesson plan for grade K English Language Arts

By Deborah Kirby

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Related pages

• Newspaper words: Students will use newspapers to find the letters for certain words, such as spelling words, or words with certain beginnings or endings, and then create those particular words by cutting and pasting.
• Letter books: Kindergarten children are usually familiar with beginning sound "ABC" books with texts such as "A is for apple." In this activity, repeated for each consonant letter, art, writing, conventional spelling, and reading are combined to create a personal "Letter Book" for each child.
• 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.

Related topics

• Learn more about alphabet, decoding, hands-on, language arts, phonemic awareness, and visual literacy.

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Learning outcomes

Students will:

• identify the beginning sounds for picture words.
• make the sound, say the letter name and then make a sentence using the word.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

30 minutes

Materials/resources

• large piece of blue bulletin board paper cut to look like a pond
• fishing pole with line attached
• large magnet at the end of the fishing line
• paper clips
• fish shapes cut from construction paper
• small picture cards attached to each fish by slipping it under the paper clip placed at the fish’s mouth
• a number (1-5) written on the tail of the fish

Pre-activities

• Students should have some knowledge of naming pictures. They should have had opportunity to match beginning sounds.
• Teacher should seat students around the pond. (Small group of 5-6) Review naming objects and beginning sounds by having each child in the group point to something in the room, name and give sound it begins with.
• Listening rule: When a student is fishing, no one else should talk.

Activities

1. Place the fish in the pond with the picture side down. Make sure the number is also down and not visible.
2. One student is given the fishing rod and asked to catch a fish by connecting the magnet at the end of the line to the paperclip on the fish. When the student has the fish in-hand, he or she names the picture, makes the beginning sound and names the letter. If the child gets the sound, but does not know the letter name, that is OK. The sound is the important piece of information in this task.
3. Ask the student to make up a sentence using the word. This skill can be expanded into a sentence building lesson very easily by asking the student to describe the noun. Each student takes a turn going clockwise around the circle.
4. After a few turns each, students then add the points on the fish’s tail for a total number of points. If this task is too hard, have students count the number of fish they caught.

Assessment

Teacher made skill checklists and student assessments at the end of the quarter will evaluate the progress toward goals and objectives.