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Emergent Literacy Design: Popping with P 

Hannah Helton 

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Rationale: This lesson will help children identify /p/, the phoneme represented by P. Students will learn to recognize /p/ in spoken words by learning a sound analogy (Pop with P, popcorn) and the letter symbol P, practice finding /p/ in words, and apply phoneme aware with /p/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters. This lesson will allow students to identify the letter P effortlessly. 

 

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Materials: 

  • Play Dough, 1 container per student 

  • Video of Popcorn Popping 

  • Letter P worksheet 

  • Primary Paper and Pencil 

  • Drawing Paper 

  • Crayons

  • Word Card with words- POKE, POP, PUMP, TAP, and POT.

  • Dr. Seuss's ABC Book

 

Procedures:

 

  1. Say: Our language is full of many interesting letters! We can think of it as a secret code. It can sometimes be tricky to learn what the letters stand for. Today we will be learning all about the letter P. We will work on spotting the mouth move for /p/, which is represented by P. P makes the noise “p”, like when we say “popcorn”. Let’s say “pop, pop, POPCORN!’ together!

  2. See if anyone can come to the whiteboard and write the letter P. If they can’t, have the teacher write it on the board. 

  3. Ask if anyone in the class has a name that starts with letter P.

  4. Say- Today we are going to be learning about another letter in our alphabet. We are going to be learning the letter P. P sounds like popcorn popping. We are going to watch a video of popcorn popping to see if we can hear what P sounds like. 

  5. [Have students listen to the video of popping popcorn]. After popcorn has finished popping- have the students imitate the noise P makes. 

  6. Ask- Do you hear P in Pan or Bowl? Salt or pepper? Tulip or sunflower? Puppy or kitten? 

  7. Say- Let’s try a tongue tickler- “Polly picked ten ripe pears.” Have the students repeat this to the person sitting next to them. 

  8.  Next, teacher should model how to write the letter P. *Have students take out primary paper and pencil* Say- We use the letter P to spell /p/. I will  demonstrate how to write the lowercase and uppercase letter P. To make the uppercase P, we go down, pick up, and go around to the fence. To make the  lowercase p, we start at the fence, go straight down into the ditch, come up and put his chin on the sidewalk.

  9. Say: “Now, we will be looking at an alphabet book! Dr. Seuss tells us about “painting some pajamas pink.” Read the page with the letter P and draw out the /p/  as I read. Then I will have the students draw a pair of pajamas, and let them color them with purple or pink, because both of those colors start with the letter P. 

 10. To finish up the lesson- Give the students the letter P worksheets for assessment.

 11. After they complete the worksheets, give each student a container of play-dough and have them make a P out of their play-dough.

 12. As they are making their letter P out of play-dough- call each student up to your desk one by one and have them read the word cards with the words POKE, POP, PUMP, TAP, AND POT. If they are pre-alphabetic, I will read each word to them first. 

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References:

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