Lesson Designs
By: Ellie Mulvaney
Beginning Reading
Ellie Mulvaney
Rationale:
This lesson will help children identify /h/, the phoneme represented by H. Students will learn to recognize /h/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (making the “h” sound, as if an owl is hooting) and the letter symbol H. The children will practice finding /h/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /h/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters. This lesson will allow students to identity the letter H effortlessly.
Materials:
Primary paper and pencil; chart with “ Henry the Hare Hopped Happily Home”; picture of owl hooting; Hilda Hen’s Scary Night (Harcourt Brace, c1995); drawing paper and crayons; pack of stickers, words cards with hug, house, hat, hog, heart, hit; assessment worksheet identifying words with /h/ (URL below).
Procedure:
1. Say: Our written language can be very confusing! It’s like a secret code and we have to figure out how to break the code. We do this by learning what letters stand for. Letters stand for how our mouth moves when we say words. Today we’re going to learn how to move our mouth and say /h/. We spell /h/ with the letter H. When we say H it looks like an owl hooting from up in a tree! When they are talking to other owls and hooting it sounds like /h/.
2. Let’s pretend to hoot like owls, /h/, /h/, /h/ . Notice where our mouth is? (open). When we say /h/, we huff air out of our mouth. Notice how your mouth is open as you breathe out the /h/ sound. Your tongue is touching the back of your bottom teeth as you ‘huff’ out air. Try it with me!
3.Let me show you how to find the /h/ in hot. I am going to stretch hot out in super slow motion and listen for me cleaning my glasses. Hhh-o-tt. Slower: Hhhh-o-o-ttt. There it was! I felt my breath coming out of my mouth with the first letter of the word! I can hear the owl hooting /h/ in hot.
4. Let’s try a tongue tickler [on chart]! “Henry the Hare Hopped Happily Home.” Everybody say it three times together. Now say it again, but this time, stretch out the /h/ at the beginning of the words. “Hhhhenry the hhhhare hhhhopped hhhhappily hhhhome.” Good! Now try it again, and this time break it off the word: “/h/enry the /h/are /h/opped /h/appily /h/ome.”
5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use the letter H to spell /h/. For capital H, start at the rooftop and go down for a wall, down for another wall, and then cross at the fence. For lowercase h, start at the rooftop, come down, and hump over. I want to see everybody’s h. After I put a sticker 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 /h/ in house or street? Hug or Kiss? Hen or Dog? Hop or Jump? High or Low? Let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /h/ in some words. Flap your owl wings if you hear /h/: help, hairy, cover, hornet, jumping, help, home, helicopter, rabbit, left.
7. Say: “Great! Now let’s all come sit and read a book! The title of our book is Hilda Hen’s Scary Night and the author is Mary Wormell. What /h/ sounds do you hear in the title? Poor Hilda the hen; she falls asleep and must find her way back to the hen house in the dark, all alone. She has to overcome her fears as she sneaks past snakes (garden-hose), monsters(rocking horse), and a huge lake(child’s pool). Let’s read the rest of the book to see what other scary things Hilda encounters and make sure she makes it home safely! I want you to remember what we learned about huffing the /h/ sounds like a hooting owl. Every time you hear the /h/ sounds I want you to quietly and quickly flap your owl wings. (Read book together).
8. Show HUG and model how to decide if it’s hug or mug. The h tells me to hoot like an owl, /h/, so the word is hhh-ug, hug. You try some: HOUSE: house or mouse? HAT: hat or cat? HIT? hit or mit? HEART: heart or cart HOG: hog or log?
9. For assessment, pass out the worksheet and have students circle and color the objects the start with h. Then, hold up the cue cards from #8 and let the students take turns reading the words on the cards.
Reference:
Susanna Fields, Running H-H-Hard with H

http://susannafields95.wixsite.com/literacylessons/emergent-literacy
Mary Kate Smith, Cleaning Your Glasses with H
http://mks0036.wixsite.com/mysite/emergent-literacy
Assessment Worksheet: