Rationale: This lesson will help children identify /h/, the phoneme represented by H. Students will learn to recognize /h/ in spoken words by learning a representation through hip hop (dancing) until tired to show the panting sound /h/, and the letter symbol H, practice finding /h/ in words, and apply phoneme awareness with /h/ in phonetic cue reading by distinguishing rhyming words from beginning letters.

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Materials: Primary paper, copy paper (provided by teacher), pencil, crayons; tongue twister chart with “Holly hopes huffing Henry has hair”; Itsy Bitsy Letter H Booklets (one for each student plus teacher copy), Flash cards with with HOG, HOT, MAT, HIT, and PILL; assessment worksheets for each student plus teacher copy identifying pictures with /h/.

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Procedures:

1. Say: Our written language is a secret code. The tricky part is learning what letters stand for—the mouth moves we make as we say words. Today we’re going to work on spotting the mouth move /h/. We spell /h/ with the letter H. H looks like a Hip Hop dance move and /h/ sounds like we’re out of breath from all the dancing!

2. Let’s do the H hip hop dance move, /h/, /h/, /h/. [Reach arms for the sky and spread legs apart slightly to make the dance move look like an H]. Do you notice what your mouth is doing? (mouth is open with upper and bottom teeth not touching, and tongue is at the bottom of your mouth). When we say /h/, we blow air out of our mouth like we’re out of breath!

3. Let me show you how to find the /h/ in the word hip. I’m going to stretch hip out in super slow motion and listen to see when it sounds like I’m out of breath. Hhh-iii-pp. Slower: Hhhh-o-o-o-ppp. There it was! I felt the air blowing out of my mouth.  /h/ is in hip.

4. Let’s try a tongue tickler [on chart]. Holly does hip hop dancing with her friend Henry every day after school. She notices that Henry always wears a hat! One day, she asks Henry, “Henry, do you have hair under that hat?” Henry is tired after dancing, so he is out of breath! Instead of answering Holly, Henry makes the /h/ sound. Here’s our tickler: “Holly hopes huffing Henry has hair.” Everybody say it three times together. Now say it again, and this time, stretch the /h/ at the beginning of the words. “Hhholly hhhopes hhhuffing Hhhenry hhhas hhhair.” Try it again, and this time break it off of the word: “/h/olly /h/opes /h/uffing /h/enry /h/as /h/air.”

5. [Have students take out primary paper and pencil]. We use letter H to spell /h/. Upper case H looks like the dance move we did earlier! Let’s write the lowercase letter h. Start with a line going up and down. Make your pencil go halfway up the line, then make it curve down. I want to see everybody’s h. After I put a smile on it, I want you to make 9 more just like it!

6. Call on students to answer and tell you how they knew: Do you hear /h/ in happy or sad? Bald or hair? House or street? Hog or dog? Hello or Goodbye? Say: Let’s see if you can spot the mouth move /h/ in some words. Make the h dance move if you hear /h/: The, happy, girl, hopped, her, way, to, her, home.

7. Say: Let’s look at our Itsy Bitsy Letter H Books. Reading the first page, draw out /h/. Allow students to read the rest of the book and color in the pictures. Ask children if they can think of any other words with /h/. [Hand out copy paper] Ask them to draw any H words they can think of and give ideas if they struggle. Display their work.

8. Show HOG and model how to decide if it is hog or dog. The H tells me to sound out of breath, /h/, so this word is hhh-og, hog. You try some: HOT: hot or dot? MAT: hat or mat? HIT: hit or fit? PILL: pill or hill?

9. For assessment, distribute the worksheet. Students will color the pictures that begin with the letter H and fill in the missing letters for each word. Call students individually to read the phonetic cue words from step #8.

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Reference:

Emma-Ruth Boles, Hopping for H https://erb0060.wixsite.com/website

Assessment worksheet: https://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/h-begins2.htm

Itsy Bitsy Book: https://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/learning-letters/ib-book-h.htm