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Touch the Roof of Your Mouth with T 

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

Materials:

  • Primary paper

  • pencil

  • chart with "Tacky tractor trailer trucks"

  • drawing paper

  • crayons

 

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 work on spotting the mouth move /t/. We spell /t/ with letter T. T looks like a tree, and /t/ sounds like knocking on a tree trunk.

2. Let's pretend to knock on a tree trunk, /t/, /t/, /t/. [Pantomime knocking] Notice where your tongue touches (Touching roof of mouth). When we say /t/, we say “ta”.

3. Let me show you how to find /t/ in the word late. I'm going to stretch late out in super slow motion and listen for my knocking sound. ll-aa-tt-ee. Slower: Lll-aa-tttt-eee There it was! I felt my tongue touch the roof of my mouth.  

4. Let's try a tongue tickler [on chart].. Tacky tractor trailer trucks. Everybody say it three times together. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /t/ at the beginning of the words. “Ttttacky ttttractor ttttrailer tttrucks." Try it again, and this time break it off the word: “/t/acky /t/ractor /t/railer /t/rucks.

5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use letter T to spell /t/. Capital T looks like a tree. Let's write the lowercase letter t. Start with the base, which looks like an “l”. Start to make a little up in the air, then straighten it out all the way down to the sidewalk. Then cross it at the fence. I want to see everybody's t. After I put a smile on it, I want you to make nine more just like it.

6. Call on students to answer and tell how they knew: Do you hear /t/ in late or mail? finger or toe? not or off? Lift or drop? take or sore? Say: Let's see if you can spot the mouth move /t/ in some words. sway like a tree if you hear /t/: A tall boy took his dog to the top of the hill.

7. Say: "Let's look at an alphabet book. We are going to read “In The Big Top”. Sway like a tree when you hear the “t” sound. 

8. Show TALL and model how to decide if it is tall or ball: The T tells me to touch the roof of my mouth, /t/, so this word is tttt-all, tall. You try some: TAP: tap or map? TEAM: beam or team? TIME: lime or time? TOLD: told or mold? TAKE: fake or take?

9. For assessment, distribute the worksheet. Students color the pictures that begin with T and leave the other pictures blank. Students who colored the correct amount of pictures are considered to have reached the objective of this lesson. 

 

References: 

www.auburn.edu/rdggenie 

Griffith, Jaima - "Tick Tock with T" https://jaimagriffith.wixsite.com/jaima-griffith/emergent-literacy-guide

 

Assessment worksheet:  http://www.kidzone.ws/prek_wrksht/learning-letters/t.htm .

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