Shhh! The Baby Is Sleeping!

Rationale: This lesson teaches children about the correspondence sh = /sh/. In order to be able to read, children must recognize the spellings that map word pronunciations. In this lesson children will learn to recognize, spell, and read words containing the phoneme /sh/. They will learn a meaningful representation (being told “Shhh” when there is a sleeping baby), they will spell words containing this phoneme in a letterbox lesson, and read a decodable book that focuses on the correspondence sh = /sh/. 

 

Materials: Graphic image of a sleeping baby; cover-up critter; whiteboard or smartboard Elkonin boxes for modeling and individual Elkonin boxes for each student; letter manipulatives for each child and magnetic or smartboard letters for teacher; s, h, o, p, r, c, k, u, t, f, i, l, a, s; list of spelling words on poster or whiteboard to read: shop, rock, shout, fish, splash, shack, short; decodable text: The Crash in the Shed and the assessment worksheet. 

 

Procedures: 1. Say: In order to become expert readers we need to learn the code that tells us how to pronounce words. We need to know what sound letters make by themselves, but we also need to know what sound letters make when they are combined, like sh. We already learned s by “sssss” like a snake and h like “hahaha” when we laugh. Now we are going to learn sh, /sh/, so think about someone telling you to “Shhh” when there is a baby sleeping. Let’s try it: let’s say “shhh” and put our finger over our lips. 

 

2. Say: We need to learn how to make the sound before we can use it. When we say “Shhh” our top and bottom teeth touch and we push our lips out like a duck. So when I say “hush”, my lips stick out and my teeth touch and I make the /sh/ sound at the end of the word. Now, let’s see if we can figure out which words have /sh/ in them, based on what we feel our mouth do. So if you hear /sh/ say “Shhh! The baby is sleeping!”, but if you don’t hear /sh/ say “The baby is awake!” Wash, back, shirt, sheep, dirt, crush, shack. 

 

3. Say: Now let’s look at the spelling of /sh/. One way to spell /sh/ is ti, like in action. So, what if I want to spell the word shut? “The girl shut the door.” Shut in this sentence means she closed the door. If I want to spell shut using letter boxes I need to know how many phonemes there are. So I will stretch it out and count: /sh//u//t/. I hear three phonemes in the word shut, which means I need three boxes. We hear /sh/ at the beginning so we'll go ahead and out down our sh in the first box. Then we hear /t/ at the end so we will put a t in the last box. And finally we hear /u/ in the middle, so we will put our u in the middle box and we will have just put “shut” into a letterbox. Our letter box should look like this: sh - u - t

 

4. Say: Now I am going to have you spell some words in the letterboxes. Start out easy with three boxes for “fish”. Do you know what a fish is? Let’s use it in a sentence like, “There are so many fish in the sea!” What letter do you think goes in the first box? [Respond to their answer.] What about the second box, what do you think goes there? [Respond to their answer.] And finally, what goes in the last box? [Respond to their final answer.] The next word is going to use three boxes as well. The word is “shop”. Let’s each do this one on our own then compare our answers. [Allow time for child to spell the word]. Time to check your work. I spelled it in my letterbox sh-o-p. Let’s try another one with three boxes. This time the word is “rock”, I want to try climbing that rock. Do you need /sh/ in the word rock? [Wait for response.] The word rock has the /cl/ sound, but not the /sh/ sound. Let’s try one more, but this time let’s do a word that has four phonemes. The word is “short”, the movie was very short. We are going to do one more word. This one has five phonemes, so you will need five boxes. The word is “splash”, the girl made a big splash in the pool. This is a bigger word, so stretch out each sound to help you put it into the letterboxes. 

 

5. Say: Now I am going to let you read the words you’ve spelled, but first I’ll show you how to read a tough word. [Display poster with “splash” on the top and model reading the word]. First I see that there is sh at the end. There is the vowel /a/ in the middle that must say “ahh”. Let’s use the cover-up critter to figure out the letters before that. [Uncover and blend sequentially before the vowel, then blend with the vowel.] /s//p//l/ = /spl/. Now let’s blend that with /a/ - /spla/. Now we just have to add /sh/ - /splash/. That’s it! Now it is your turn! [Have children read words in unison. Afterwards, call on individuals to read one word on the list until everyone has had a turn.] 

 

6. Say: You have done such a great job reading words with our new spelling sh = /sh/. The next thing we are going to do is read a book called The Crash in the Shed. This book is about two friends named Ben and Jess and they cannot decide if they want to collect fish or seashells. They hear a crash in the shed that doesn’t sound too good. I wonder what it could be!! [Children pair up and take turns reading alternate pages each while the teacher walks around the room monitoring progress. After individual paired reading, the class rereads The Crash in the Shed aloud together, and does talk before you turn after each page.] 

 

6. Say: That was such a fun story! Did you guess right about what the crash in the shed was? Now that we have learned about /sh/, let’s do a worksheet to show everything we learned. You are going to circle the pictures that have /sh/ in them. After you finish compare your work with a partner, then we will go over it all together.