Emergent Literacy Design 

Ping-Pong Paddle P

 

Rationale: The point of this lesson is to help students understand that /p/ is what represents for the phoneme P. The student will recognize this by learning a sound analogy (ping pong ball tapping) and the letter P, practice finding /p/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /p/ in phonetic cue reading by picking out rhyming words from the starting letter.

Materials Needed:

primary paper and pencil; the decodable book “Pats Perfect Pizza” by: F.R. Robinson (or another decodable book for the phoneme /p/), tongue twister for Polly Plays Ping Pong (listed below in procedures), paper and crayons, and the assessment worksheet for P. Also,word cards with: Pop, Play, Pure, Pan, Clop, Pick.

 Procedures:

1. Say: “Sometimes it is difficult to remember all the sounds in our language and what each letter is for. Today we are going to work on /p/ and how to say the sound and hear it well. We spell /p/ with the letter P. Think of how P looks like a ping-pong paddle and when it hits it makes a /p/ sounds like playing ping-pong.”  

2. Let us pretend like we are playing ping-pong /p/,/p/,/p/,. Everyone hold up your pretend paddle (hold at hand and play imagine) now pretend you are hitting a ball and make the /p/ sound (make sure to tell them this is a slight motion we don’t want to hit our friends). When we hit the ping-pong ball it makes the /p/ sounds just like /p/ starts the words ping and pong and paddle.

3. I am going to show you how to find /p/ in the word super. Let me stretch out the word super slow as I pretend to be swinging back my ping-pong paddle. I will “hit” the ball when we hear the /p/ sound. Sss-u-u-u-p-eeer. Did you hear it? I heard my paddle hit the ball; /p/ is in the word super!

4. Here let us say a tongue tickler together. Polly Price loves to play ping-pong. The problem is she plays way too much and gets super tired so, Polly’s mom put the ping-pong paddles away. Here is the tongue tickler: “Polly Price Plays Ping-Pong”. Say it with me and really elaborate when we get to the letter P. Let’s clap out hands together each time we hear the /p/ sound. “P-olly P-rice P-lays P-ing P-ong”

5. Have each student take out primary paper and a pencil to write. We use the letter P to spell /p/. Have them practice writing both upper and lowercase P showing how it can look like a ping-pong paddle. Draw a line to form the handle of the paddle staring at the rooftop and going down to the sidewalk. Next, make an arch on the side of you line to form the face of the paddle by starting at the rooftop and curving down to the fence. Let me see everyone’s ping-pong paddle p. When I give you a thumbs-up draw nine more just like it.

6. Call on students and tell how they knew: Do you hear /p/ in pot or hat? Purse or belt? Popcorn or Skittles? Play or Sleep? Say: Let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /p/ in some words. Swing your ping-pong paddle if you hear /p: The, pretty, people, like, pizza, plums, and, the, park.

7. Say: “Let’s look at a story that tells us about the Perfect Pizza. Read several pages and have students swing their ping pong paddle when they hear the /p/. Ask them to name some other words starting with /p/. Let them each draw a pizza with crayons and inside of the pizza draw toppings that start with p. It can be non-pizza things as well such as peanut butter or peas. Let them share their work if time permits.

8. Show the word POP and model how to decide if it is pop or tot: The P tells us to hit our ping-pong ball /p/, so this word if P-o-p. You try some… PLAY: play or clay? PURE: pure or cure? PAN: pan or tan? CLOP: clop or plop? PICK: pick or tick?

9. For assessment, hand out the worksheet. Students can color pictures that have P. call students to read out words from step #8.

Reference: F.R. Robinson book, Pats Perfect Pizza. http://wp.auburn.edu/rdggenie/

Assessment worksheet: http://cleverlearner.com/letter-identification/preschool-letter-p-identification-test-sheet.html