Rationale:
This lesson will help children identify hard /g/, the phoneme represented by
F. Students will learn to recognize
/g/ in spoken words by learning a meaningful representation (gulping water) and
the letter symbol G, practice finding
/f/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /g/ in phonetic cue reading by
distinguishing rhyming words from beginning words.

1.
Say: English is made up of different letters that make all different kinds of
sounds. The symbol G makes two
different sounds. There is the hard /g/ sound, as heard in
guh and the soft /g/ sound that
sounds like juh. You can tell the
difference by the way your mouth moves. We spell hard /g/ with
G. G looks like a big drop of water,
and we gulp down water.

2.
Let's pretend we are gulping water, /g/, /g/, /g/. [Pretend to gulp water.]
Notice where your tongue is. (Back of it is pressed to the top of your mouth and
the front is pressed to the bottom, kind of closing your throat off.)

3.
Let me show you how to find /g/ in the word
long. I'm going to say
long very, very slowly and stretch
out all the different sounds. Lllll-ooooo-nnnn-gggg. I can feel my tongue
pressing the roof of my mouth back there in the back. You say it. Can you feel
it? Where?

4.
Let's say a tongue twister. [Refer to chart]. "Gary was glad to play games with
grandmother's green garden." Everybody say it three times together. Now say it
again but this time very slowly and stretch out the /g/ at the beginning of each
word. "/G/ary was /g/lad to play /g/ames in his /g/randmother's /g/reen /g/arden."

5.
[Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use
G to spell /g/. Capital G looks like
a drop of water. Let's write lowercase g.
This also looks like a droplet! Start just below the middle dotted line, make a
little c, come all the way back up to
the dotted line, and then drop all the way down into the ditch and make a tail.
I want to see everybody's g. After I
check it off, I want you to make 9 more just like it.

6.
Call on students to answer and tell how they knew: Do you hear /g/ in
gum or
dumb? Do you hear /g/ in
hood or
good?
Great or
state? Let's see if you can spot the
/g/ mouth move in some words. Gargle if you hear /g/:
the, goat, gave, me, peanuts, flowers,
and, chocolate.

7.
Say: "Let's look at an alphabet book! Lois Ehlert tells us about all kinds of
different foods that start with each letter. Look on page 9 at and draw out /g/.
Ask children if they can think of other foods that start with /g/. Then have the
students write the food on their primary paper and draw a picture of it. Share
the work within the group.

8.
Show GONE and model how to decide if it is
gone or
done.
G tells me to gargle, /g/, so this
word is ggg-gone, gone. Now you try
some: GO: go or no? GLOW: glow or flow? GLEE: glee or bee? GAIN: gain or pain?

9.
Assessment: Distribute the worksheet. Students are to say the name of each word
out loud and listen for the hard /g/ sound, color the pictures, and then trace
the upper and lowercase G's at the
bottom of the page.