MA Standards:
Foundational Skills/RF.PK.MA.2.c: Identify the initial sound of a spoken word and, with guidance and support, generate several other words that have the same initial sound.
Head Start Outcomes:
Language Development/Receptive Language: Attends to language during conversations, songs, stories, or other learning experiences.
Literacy Knowledge/Phonological Awareness: Identifies and discriminates between sounds and phonemes in language, such as attention to beginning and ending sounds of words and recognition that different words begin or end with the same sound.
PreK Learning Guidelines:
English Language Arts/Reading and Literature 8: Listen to, identify, and manipulate language sounds to develop auditory discrimination and phonemic awareness.
Word Play: Alliteration (/u/)
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ELA Focus Skills: Listening and Speaking, Phonological Awareness (Alliteration, Beginning Sounds), Vocabulary
Ask children to listen carefully as you say the tongue twister Up under Uncle’s ugly umbrella.
Ask children what sound they hear at the beginning of each word in the sentence (short /u/ sound). Repeat the words slowly, emphasizing the beginning sound short /u/. Prompt children to say each word after you.
Challenge children to repeat the tongue twister three times, faster and faster. Remind them that sentences with lots of words beginning with the same sound are called “tongue twisters.” (The faster you say them, the more mixed up you can get!)
Take It Further: Help interested children make up more alliterative sentences of their own, with real or made-up words.
Educator Tip: Guided and independent letter, sound, and word practice continues to take place in center activities. It is helpful to set up the literacy center immediately after the direct instruction and repeat instruction before children work in the literacy center identifying letters.