top of page

Beginning Literacy: Let's go "Eeee!" on the Rollercoaster!

Rationale: This lesson’s goal is to teach children about the long vowel correspondences of ee/ea = /E/. These are the most common spellings of the long /E/ phoneme so it is important that children learn it in order to develop reading fluency. They will review the phoneme with a memorable sound analogy (someone on a rollercoaster might say “Eeeee!”), then apply their new understanding of the correspondence in a Letterbox lesson and reading a decodable book that focuses on the long /E/ phoneme.

 

 

Materials: Letterbox squares, sentence/picture comparison worksheets, Plastic letter tiles to spell and flashcards to read the following word list for the letterbox lesson:

beef (3)

met (3)

pen (3)

teach (3)

cheese (3)

pack (3)

least (4)

preen (4)

slack (4)

steel (4)

 

 

Procedures:

  1. We’ve learned about long vowels that say their names when they team up with a silent e like a_e, i_e, u_e, and o_e. But what does poor old e do when it wants to say its name? It teams up with other vowels too! Sometimes e says its name by teaming up with its twin another e, side by side, like in “green” (show the word green on the poster/flashcard). Other times, it teams up with its friend a side by side, like in “team” (show the word team). A good way to remember the sound long E makes is to think of people riding a rollercoaster saying “Eeeeee!” as they go super fast. (show picture of people on rollercoaster)

  2. Before we start practicing spelling our long e words, we need to make sure we can hear it when we say it! Remember our rollercoaster riders saying “Eeeee!”? We can use them to help us listen for long E. If I say the word “tease”, I can decide if I heard long E by listening for the rollercoaster riders. Let’s try that. t…ea…se. t…ea- ea… eeee! There! I think that’s it! I think I found the rollercoaster riders saying “Eeee!” in tease! Now you try to listen for E in these words, and if you hear it, I want you to lift up your arms like you’re on a rollercoaster (demonstrate the motion). Cheese, rain, lot, please, greet, road, cheat.

  3. Now we’re going to practice spelling some long e words in our letterboxes. I’ll show you how to do one first before you try your own. Let’s say I want to spell the word “green”. The first thing I need to do is count the sounds, so let’s do that. g-r-ee-n. g, 1- r, 2- ee, 3- n, 4. So I need 4 letterboxes to spell “green”. Now, where should I put our double e? Let’s think of where I heard the rollercoaster riders by saying the word again. G-r-ee-n. I think I heard them right before the /n/ sound! So that’s the… 1, g, 2, r, 3, ee- the 3rd sound in our boxes! Let’s put our long /E/ in the 3rd box. Now we’ve also heard the other sounds in green, so we can start putting down our other letters. Let’s listen again. /g/, that’s a g! So we’ll find the g and put it in our first box. Then comes /r/… that’s an r! So that goes in the second box. And finally our last sound is /n/, and that’s an n, so let’s put it in our very last box. There we have it! G-r-ee-n… Green!

  4. Now it’s your turn to spell some long e words. It might be tricky to decide whether to use double e or ea but make your best guess and I’ll be sure to let you all know which one it is after you’re done. Remember that we’ll also have some review words with short vowels in our list so listen for those carefully! Our first word is “beef”. Listen to each sound and put the letters in the boxes you think they should go in to spell “beef”. I’ll watch as you do. (repeat process for all words in the LBL list in the materials section, observing children as they spell and scaffolding/corrected where needed, most likely by correcting ee/ea swaps)

  5. Now that you’ve done so well on spelling all those words, we’re going to read them. I’ll read an example one first. Here we have “green” again. (show green flashcard) The first thing I notice is our double e team in the middle, we learned that they make a long e sound, so let’s remember that as we decode the other letters. We’ll start at the beginning. G…r…ee…n. Green! There it is! We read the word “green”! Now I’ll go through our list and you can try. (flip though the flashcards as students read each LBL word, ensuring to correct any widespread errors they may make)

  6. Our next step in learning all we can about long E is to read a story with long E words in it. This story is called “The Green Feast”. Mom just made a huge dinner! Jan and Tim help set up the table while Nate just plays. They say the blessing and dig into the food. But Nate doesn’t want to eat his vegetables. Will his family be able to convince him to eat what’s good for him? Let’s find out by reading! You can take turns reading the story and be sure to pause after each page to think about what just happened. Try explaining to your classmates in your own words what the characters in the story did or what you think they might do next. (Wait for students to read the story, scaffolding if needed)

  7. You all did a great job reading and spelling all those long E words today. To finish up, we’re going to review by completing this worksheet with several sentences for you to read that all have long E sounds. I want you to circle the picture that best describes each sentence.

 

References:

Oh, I didn’t know! by Geralyn Murray

https://sites.google.com/site/readingwritingconnection/beggingreadingdesign

bottom of page