Melissa Murphree

Rationale: This lesson will help children identify /d/, the phoneme represented by D. Students will learn to recognize /d/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (ringing a doorbell) and the letter symbol D, practice finding /d/ in words and apply phoneme awareness with /d/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters. 

Materials:

            -      Primary paper and pencil

            -      Poster with the tongue tickler “Danielle dances during the daytime”

            -      Construction paper and markers or crayons; Dr. Seuss’s ABC (Random House, 1963)

            -      Word cards with DOG, DATE, GIRL, DOOR, BALL, PLAY, COUCH

            -      Assessment worksheet identifying pictures with /d/ (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 look at how the mouth says /d/. We spell /d/ with the letter D. 

2. What sound do you hear when a doorbell rings? “Ding-Dong, Ding-Dong”. What letter do you hear? “D”. Now let’s practice moving our mouth while saying /d/. The tongue touches the roof of the mouth and then the back of the bottom teeth as we finish saying /d/. 

3. Let me show you how to find /d/ in the word lady. I’m going to stretch lady out in super slow motion and listen for /d/. Lll-a-a-ady. Slower: Lll-a-a-a-ddd-y. There it was! I felt my tongue touch the roof of my mouth. 

4. Let’s try a tongue tickler [on poster]. “Danielle dances during the daytime.” Everybody say it together 3 times. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /d/ at the beginning of the words. “Dddanielle dddances ddduring the dddaytime.” Try it again and this time break it off the word: “/d/anielle /d/ances /d/uring the /d/aytime.”

5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil.] We use letter D to spell /d/. Let’s write the uppercase D. Start at the rooftop and draw a straight line down to the sidewalk, then draw a half circle starting at the rooftop on the straight line and curve around to the sidewalk. Now let’s write the lowercase d. Draw a straight line down starting at the rooftop and go down to the sidewalk, then draw a little c on the left side of the straight line. I want to see everybody write uppercase D and lowercase d. Once I see that you are writing your letters I will come around and put a sticker on your paper and then I want you to write 5 uppercase and 5 lowercase of the letter D. 

6. Call on students to answer and tell how they knew: Do you hear /d/ in dog or cat? Up or down? Truth or dare? Day or night? Say: Let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /d/ in some words. Ding-Dong the doorbell if you hear /d/: The, dog, dug, a hole, down, in, the, ditch.

7. Say: “Let’s look at an alphabet book. Dr. Seuss tells us about a boy who has a crazy dream.” Read page 12, drawing out /d/. Ask children if they can think of other words with /d/. Ask them to make up a dream about things that start with letter D. Then have each student write their dream out with invented spelling and draw a picture of their dream. Display their work. 

8. Show DOG and model how to decide if it is dog or fog: The D tells me to touch my tongue to the roof of my mouth and say /d/, so this word is ddd-og, dog. You try some: DATE: date or mate? DOOR: door or poor? BALL: doll or ball? 

9. For assessment, distribute the worksheet. Students are to complete the partial spellings and color the pictures that begin with D. Call students individually to read the phonetic cue words from step #8. 

References: