"Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad"
Sample Lesson Plan
Step 2: Phonemic Awareness and Word Recognition Skills for
Emergent, Beginning, and Transitional Readers
Target Objectives
- Children at three stages of reading will develop their phonemic awareness
and word recognition skills.
- 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.
Student Activities
- 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.
Electronic Resources
- 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
Assessment
- 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.
Impact of Technology: In what ways (if any) will technology enhance students'
learning experiences in these activities?
- 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.
Copyright © 2000, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC)