"Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad"
Sample Lesson Plan

Step 2: Phonemic Awareness and Word Recognition Skills for Emergent, Beginning, and Transitional Readers

Children at three stages of reading will develop their phonemic awareness and word recognition skills. (See the MCPS Early Literacy Guide)
Children will understand all the Frog and Toad episodes.
Children will develop their writing skills by responding to the Frog and Toad characters and their episodes in both books.

Develop phonemic awareness skills and phonics skills related to the words encountered in the Frog and Toad books. See "Making and Writing Words Using Letter Patterns" by Timothy Rasinski.
Continue reading the remaining episodes of Frog and Toad are Friends and Frog and Toad Together, as I did in Step 1, but differentiating instruction according to children's reading levels (that is, read aloud to emergent readers as they follow along and have beginning and transitional level readers read independently with varying degrees of support). Provide targeted instruction for students who may have learning disabilities (LD) and English Language Learners (ELLs).
Continue word recognition activities by adding to the word wall, and individualized dictionaries.
Practice phonemic awareness and phonics skills using activities from PBS's "Between the Lions" web site. Children should work in groups on the following activities from this web site: "Tiger Words", "A.B. Cow", "Fuzzy Lion Ears", and "Chicken Stacker".
Have children dramatize their favorite episodes from both books. Team advanced readers/writers with emergent and beginning readers/writers to create scripts. Then have students take turns acting out their episodes. Capture students' dramatizations using a camcorder (or a digital camera) and invite other first graders and parents to view them.

Word Processor software for writing scripts.
Camcorder or digital camera. (If using the digital camera, import images into word processing software for writing projects.)
PBS's "Between the Lions" web site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/lions/farmer/index.html

Save children's scripts and recordings of their dramatizations in their portfolios.
Evaluate children's ability to read and understand the Frog and Toad books.

Recording children's dramatizations of Frog and Toad episodes will provide a way for children to later review their early interpretations, and compare them with the other stories and pamphlets they will create.
PBS's "Between the Lions" web site provides lots of fun ways for students to practice phonemic awareness and word recognition skills.