Hot Potato Phonemic Awareness Activity

Materials: -Basket - Pictures of desired words - A large area where all students can sit in a circle on the floor Students will identify the sound that the teacher has requested (beginning, middle, end), based on the picture that they have drawn from the basket. (Which sound student is asked to identify will rely on their reading/writing abilities) First the teacher will ask the students to form a circle on the floor, where all students can comfortably sit. Then the teacher will explain the hot potato game to the students. They will explain how the chant will work and how the students are going to pass the basket around the circle. The teacher will recite the chant: I have pictures in my basket and I m looking for a sound. I have pictures in my basket give me a sound now. (students stop passing basket)_(student s name)__, please tell me the __(beginning, middle, end)___ sound. The teacher will select the sound that needs to be identified based on the student s reading/writing abilities. (Highest students will be asked to identify middle, at grade level student will be asked to identify beginning or end, struggling students will be asked to identify beginning sound) After the chant is over and the teacher has selected the sound for the student to identify, they will allow the student an appropriate amount of time to select a picture, identify the word, and then identified the sound the teacher has asked them to identify. This will continue until all students have participated in selecting a picture at least once. Students will pay attention to the teacher s chant. While teacher is reciting the chant students will work together to pass the basket of pictures around the circle. When the teacher s chant stops, the student with the basket will select a picture. The teacher will inform them in the chant prior to the student selecting the picture that the student needs to identify. The student will state the word that the picture represents and then the sound (beginning, middle, or end) that the teacher has asked them to identify. After the student has done this, they will start the basket being passed around the circle again. Assessment will be done while students are participating in this lesson through observation of word/picture association and then identifying the sound (beginning, middle, end) that the teacher has asked them to identify. This lesson was done more than one time. It was done on 2/26/12 whole group with my kindergarten practicum classroom. The second time I did this lesson with a group of low learners (called the Zebras) made up from all the kindergarten classrooms. The lesson was done the second time on 2/27/12. Whole Group: After doing this lesson a few time in my kindergarten practicum, I started to realize how much the students were not only making progress identifying sounds, but that they really enjoyed this lesson. One

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thing that I would make sure to do next time is to find other pictures to include. I think the more pictures/words included the more that the students will benefit. It was very interesting to see how the students on all 3 levels participated in this activity. All the students seemed to enjoy it, so we have incorporated it into a game that students can choose to play in their reading groups on Fridays. Zebras Small Group: This group was having issues understanding the different sounds of a word. Most of them could identify the beginning sound, even less the ending sound, and maybe one or two could identify middle sounds. We chose to work on ending sounds because half or more of this group was doing well with beginning sounds. To help aid in their understanding of the different parts of a word I created a cat analogy. The beginning sound is the cat s head, the middle sound is the cat s tummy, and the ending sound is the cat s tail. Once we had taken the time to cut apart a few words and demonstrate this, the students seemed to grasp the concept better and we successfully continued our lesson. (a picture of the cat we used is displayed below)