Rationale:

This lesson is designed to teach the long vowel correspondence ee=/E/. To be able to kick off beginning readers smoothly, children must master spelling recognition to map word pronunciation. In this lesson, students will be taught how to recognize, read, and spell words with the spelling ee=/E/. They will be able to recall analogies like “sleeping bees” and they will read and spell these words in a Letterbox Lesson as well as read a full decodable book containing the ee=/E/ correspondence.

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Materials (per student):

Image of a tired bee laying on an “ee” shaped pillow for student to refer back to ( ); letter boxes with the letter tiles: k, d, p, e(2), r, l, a, w; white board and an expo-marker; coverup critter; print out of the ee=/E/ decodable passage The Eel and a highlighter; assessment worksheets.

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Procedures:

1. Instruct students to gather all the necessary materials you handed out to them for the lesson and ask them to pull out their picture of the tired bee first and say: “we are going to be learning about a bee that needs sleep but in order for the bee to sleep we need to learn how to recognize his favorite pillow shaped as the letters ‘ee’.” Make sure they repeat the letters “e e” to you together as you point to the pillow on the picture. Remind them: “we have already learned the short vowel e=/e/ like in words led.”

2. Now inform students: “before we start looking at ‘ee’ on paper lets listen for the long vowel sound /E/ in a few words. Now, when we listen for the long vowel /E/ in words we want to think about the slEEEEEEping bEEEEEE in our picture and you can also your put your palms together and lay one side of your head like your laying down for sleep when you hear /E/. Let me show you how I do it (show sleeping motion when you say /E/ words): ‘sleep, lep, deep, step, keep, beep.’ Now you try with me: ‘need, feed, met, head, vet, reed, peek, bet.’”

3. “Now let’s look at the physical spelling of our ee=/E/ correspondence. The spelling of /E/ we are looking at today is with two e’s. What if I want to spell the word ‘sleep’? The second e tells the other e to drag out its natural sound of its name ‘eeeeee.’ Let’s take out our letter boxes to practice! Take out all of the letters you were instructed to have for this lesson so we can spell ‘sleep’ together! How many letter boxes will we need for our letters? Let’s say the word out loud and count with your fingers the number of sounds we hear: ‘s—l—ee—p’. How many fingers do you have help up? 4! Great! We will lay 4 boxes down on the table. Now I want each of you to pick out the letters for our word ‘SLEEP’ and lay them on the boxes. It is okay if you get it wrong this time because we will go over it together and fix it if you messed up.”

4. Let students share their spellings of the word “sleep” then instruct them if they are incorrect and show them the correct spelling: “The right spelling for our word is /s/, /l/, /ee/, /p/. remember our ee spelling of /E/ will always be in the same letter box because ‘eeeeeee’ is one sound.” Now try the word ‘d—ee—p’. How many sounds did you hear? 3? Awesome! Lay down 3 letter boxes and we will use letter d, e, e, and p to spell the word we want. Your letter box should look like this (show your letter box) /d/, /ee/, /p/. You are doing great so far!” show them the picture analogy again along with the sound of the ee=/E/ correspondence.

5. “Now that we are able to recognize the letters in our words, I want you to practice writing/ spelling this new word: ‘keep’ on your white board. First, I want you to write them by yourself then hold up your white boards when you think you have it written. Remember you can sound out the word a loud if it helps you.” (look at each student’s spelling to see what they did wrong) “Awesome work! It is okay if you did not spell it right this time. This is how it is correctly spelled (write it on the board for everyone to see then write it with dashes between the phonemes): ‘keep,’ ‘k—ee—p’ (say the sounds aloud as you spell). 2

6. Now let’s use our letter boxes again to try to spell the word ‘feet.’ We have to say our word aloud first to determine how many sounds we have to know how many boxes to put down. What letter goes in our first box? (respond to students’ answers) ‘f’. Second box? ‘ee.’ And third box? ‘t.’ Your letter boxes should look like this: ‘f—ee—t.’ Awesome! Make sure you remember /E/ is spelled ee in this lesson and is in one box together because ee=/E/ is one sound.” Great, now take your letters off and put them away and use your white board to write/spell feet by yourself and hold it up when you finish.” Address what students got wrong and what they got right then write the word on the board for everyone to see “feet” and write with dashes between the phonemes and sound it out aloud for them “f—ee—t” as you follow along with your finger. (try this same procedure with the words: need, bed, feed and seep. Make sure to emphasize the importance of identifying the short e=/e/ in bed as an example that e without its e partner only makes a short /e/ sound).

7. “Now that we looked at and practice writing/spelling a few ee=/E/ words on our own, we will read the decodable passage, The Eel, that I have handed out to you.” Include book talk: “in this passage, a boy named Dean went to the beach one day for a swim so he could look at all the cool fish in the sea. Have you ever been swimming in the ocean and seen some cool fish? Yes, but I bet you have not seen what dean saw! Let’s find out what creepy fish he saw.” Now say “Now, as we read, I want you to highlight the words that you hear the long vowel /E/ in with the ‘ee’ spelling. REMEMBER ONLY HIGHLIGHT ‘ee’ SPELLINGS” (Have students highlight ee=/E/ correspondence words as you read along. Do not read too fast so no students lose track or get left behind). This will give students practice identifying ee=/E/ words in a larger text. Then, get students to share the words they highlighted and correct them on what words they should not have highlighted (if any) and praise them on the words they correctly highlighted.

8. “Now that we practiced spelling, writing, and reading words with the long vowel /E/ correspondence complete these assessment worksheets so we can see how much we learned today. Make sure you are working on this alone so you can really see what YOU know.” (Instruct students to complete the worksheets attached below after reading the directions.)

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References:

Makenzie Jones, Uhh, I Don’t Know… https://makenziejones98.wixsite.com/mysite3/beginning-reading Picture

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Decodable Passage: The Eel https://readingelephant.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Eel-1.pdf

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Assessment Sheets: https://www.themeasuredmom.com/wpcontent/uploads/2016/04/eewrdswrkshts.pdf