Ay Batter Batter Batter, SWING!

A Beginning Reading Lesson

By Allie Harmon

 

 

Rationale:

This lesson introduces the long vowel correspondence a_e= /A/. Beginning readers often lack many of the crucial vowel correspondences, which prevents them from reading automatically and accurately. To be able to read, students must be able to recognize the spellings of letters to recognize their sounds, or pronunciations in the word. In this lesson, children will learn how to recognize, spell, and read words with the spelling, a_e, recognizing that it says /A/. They will learn meaningful representation (baseball players chant “Ay batter batter batter”), they will spell and read words containing the spelling a_e in a Letterbox lesson, and they will read a decodable book that focuses on the correspondence a_e=/A/.

 

Materials:

• Laminated image of a batter on home plate preparing to hit a pitched baseball

• Cover-up critter

• Letterboxes and letters

  • Words: scrape, ate, game, blame

  • Letters: s,c,r,a,p,e,t,g,m,b,l

• “James and the Good Day”

• Small dry/erase board for teacher

• Assessment Worksheets

• Lined paper, pencil

 

Procedures:

Say: I believe you all can do what it takes to become experts (like professionals) at reading! In order to accomplish that, we must learn how to read the letters that we see in words. For example, we have learned that when you see the letter “a” in cat, you read it as /a/. We call that sound the short a.  You have learned the code that a=/a/ and now have the information you need to be able to read short a in any word. Today we are going to learn a new code, the long A: a_e= /A/. The silent e on the end tells the a to say its name. Imagine you are at your big brothers baseball game and he is up to bat and you hear the other team in the dugout chanting “Ay batter batter batter, SWING!” The “Ay” in that chant is how you should read the code a_e when it appears in words.

 

Say: The first thing we need to be able to do is to recognize the sound that a_e makes when we hear it in spoken words. When you hear /A/ in words, you hear a say its name, like in Ay batter batter batter. When I say /A/ my mouth starts open and closes as I make the sound. Your lips are open and wide, almost like a smile. Listen to me say the long A in game very slowly and watch for my mouth closing and wide-lipped smile. Game. G-g-g-g-a-a-a-a-m-m-m-m-e. Do you hear long A in game? Is it in plan or plane? I am going to read a few words and if you hear the long A sound give me a wide-lipped smile. If you do not, give me your best scowl. Here we go: “Family, shame, babe, ran, frame”. Very good!

 

Say: Now that we know how to recognize the sound that long A makes when you hear it in spoken words, lets work on learning how to recognize/spell long A when it appears in written words. The long A sound can be spelled a few different ways, but today we are going to focus on a_e =/A/. <Show spelling on dry/erase board>. That line between a and e means that there is a letter missing before the silent e. Do you hear long A in “scrape”? “Jenny put too much peanut butter on her sandwich so her mother had her SCRAPE some of it off with a butter knife.” To spell scrape in our letterboxes, I need to know how many boxes to set up and we know that each phoneme is put in each box. So help me count the phonemes in scrape. I will say it slowly and you count: /s//k//r//A//p/. Did you hear 5? I heard 5 so lets put 5 boxes out. I think I heard the long A sound right before the last phoneme /p/ so I am going to put the a in the fourth box and the bossy Mr. E that makes vowels say their name on the end, outside of the last box. After the sound A I heard a sound /p/ made by the letter p so I will put that in the fifth box. So far we have the word “ape”: /A//p/. Now we will look at the sounds in the beginning of the word: /s/ (I hear an “s” so I am going to put that in the first box), /k/ (the sound /k/ is sometimes made by a c, as it is in this case), and /r/ (like growling) goes right before the long A.

 

Say: Now that I have spelling “scrape”, I want you to practice spelling some words I give to you with the Letterboxes. Lets begin with words with only two phonemes. Ate: Your mom was pleased because you ate all your vegetables. You need two boxes for “ate”. What goes in the first box? Now the second? Did you remember the Bossy Mr. E outside of the last box that makes “a” says its name? <Walk around room and observe spellings>. Now lets try one with three letterboxes: game. The bored students begged the teacher for a game. <Show how to do it on the dry/erase board>. Did you come up with the same spelling as I did? Can someone in the class please tell me how many boxes you need for the word blame? Four is correct! Now who can come up and show the class how to spell it in the letterboxes? Was he/she correct? Good work.

 

Say: Now, we will read the words we spelled. I am going to show you how to read a tougher word: “slate”. The teacher called on Lucy but her mind was a blank slate. <Show “slate” on the dry erase board>. I notice first the silent e on the end that makes the vowel say its name. Now I see the letter a, so I know that the vowel will say “Ayy”. Using my coverup critter, I am going to figure out the beginning part <decode and blend for “sl”>. So far we have /s//l//A/, now we finally at the /t/ for /s//l//A//t/. Now everyone read it!

 

Say: Next, we will read a book that has words in it like the ones we just learned how to spell and read. This book is called James and the Good Day. See this boy? His name is James. Its bath time but he isn’t paying attention to the running water. Uh oh! It looks like water is about to spill over! I wonder if James’s mom is going to be happy… Everyone choose a partner and read the book out loud to him/her. Then switch. <As children read, I will walk around the room and observe/assess>. Now that yall have read it, someone tell me what James’ mom was feeling when she saw James’ mess. Do you think James will do that again?

 

<Pass out worksheet that has pictures and lines for writing>

 

Say: Let’s see how well you can recognize a_e. Who has played bingo before? On the worksheet is a bingo game with a_e words. If you recognize that a word is long A, color in the box. Whoever can color in a whole row or column of long A words, wins!

 

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Resources:

 

Assessment worksheet:

http://blog.maketaketeach.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/4-In-A-Row-Magic-e-Freebie1.gif

 

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Connoly Harbarger, Ahhhhh Said the Tired Boy:

https://sites.google.com/site/msharbargersreadinglesson/home/ahhhh-said-the-tired-boy