Blowfish Blowing Bubbles with B
By: Tay Tay Stroud
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Rational- This lesson will help children identify /b/, the phoneme represented by B. Students will learn to recognize /b/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (pretending to blow bubbles under water) and the letter symbol B, practice finding /b/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /b/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.
Material- Primary paper and pencils; chart with "Ben bakes banana bread for Billy” ; word cards with BIG, BOX, FEET, BALL, MOST, and BIKE; picture of a fish blowing bubbles; poem using the /b/ sound and assessment worksheet (URLs below).
Procedure-
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Say: Our language is very special, it is a secret code. The way to discover the code is to figure out what letters stand for and what letters make words - the way we move our mouths when we say words. Today we are going to work on how to say /b/. We spell /b/ with letter B and it sounds like blowing bubbles under water.
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Lets pretend we are fish blowing bubbles under water /b/,/b/,/b/. (Act out blowing bubbles while emphasizing the /b/ sound). Notice where your lips are (point to lips), they are lightly smacking against each other. When we say /b/ our lips touch and then reopen again to make the sound.
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Let me show you how to find /b/ in the word grab. I will say the word super slowly and stretch out all the letters so you can listen for the bubble blowing. gg-rr-aa-b. Slower: ggg-rrr-aaa-bbbb. Did you hear that at the end? I was blowing my bubbles with my lips smacking against each other. I can feel the /b/ in grab.
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Let’s try a tongue twister [on chart]. "Ben bakes banana bread for Billy” can you say it three times slowly. Now this time stretch the /b/ out at the beginning of every word. "Bbbben bbbakes bbbbanana bbbbread for Bbbbilly." Try it again and break the /b/ off at the beginning of each word. "/b/ en the /b/akes /b/anana /b/read for /b/ illy."
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(Instruct student to take out the primary paper and pencil). We use B to spell /b/. Look at your lines on your paper as a rooftop (top line), fence (dashed line), and sidewalk (bottom line). We can start by practicing the upper case B, draw your line on the left from rooftop to sidewalk. Next, connect starting at the rooftop and draw a half circle to the fence that ends in the middle of the line. Do the same from the fence to the sidewalk by drawing another half circle. Let’s now practice writing the lowercase b, draw your line from rooftop to sidewalk again but this time just draw on half circle connecting at the middle of the line on the fence and going to the bottom at the sidewalk. I want to see your lowercase and uppercase b’s. Once I check them I want you to draw 5 more lowercase b’s and 5 more uppercase B’s.
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Call on students to answer the following and ask them to explain how they knew: Do you hear /b/ in bird or dog? End or begin? Grab or give? Trouble or happy? Soccer or football? Say: Let’s see if you can feel your lips pressing together to make /b/ in this sentence. Bounce you basketballs if you hear /b/: The, busy, yellow, bee, flew, by, the, bear, near, the, barn.
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Pass out poems to every student. Say: I’m going to read you a poem about a bird. Every time you hear the /b/ sound I want you to clap. I’m going to read it slower the second time and I want you to write the blowing bubbles /b/ words on your paper. (The words they need to write down are Bonnie, blue, bird, bye, birdie). Since the words are right in front of the students invented spelling is not going to be a huge issue.
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Show BIG and model how to decide if it is big or dig: The B tells me to blow my bubbles, /b/, bbbig, big. You try some: BOX: box or fox? FEET: meet or feet? BALL: ball or tall? MOST: post or most? BIKE: bike or hike?
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For assessment, the students will do the worksheet that has been distributed to them. Students are to draw a line from the each butterfly to the words that begin with /b/. Call students individually to read the phonetic cues from step #8.
Reference-
Fall 2011 Nikki Tucker- http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/doorways/tuckernel.htm
Fall 2016 Liz Messina- http://eam0040.wixsite.com/missmessina/emergent-literacy
Poem: http://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/b-poem.htm
Assessment: http://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/b-begins1.htm
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