Pre-K Lesson Plan

A GEORGIA SCHOOL has found an ingenious way to teach its youngest students about rhymes. By using an interactive whiteboard, Dug Gap Elementary School in Dalton, part of the Whitfield County School System, is making learning fun and successful for pre-K children of all learning styles and abilities. For a majority of the students, English is their second language, so teachers must use creative teaching methods to ensure that all students succeed.

Lesson description: The teacher reviews with students the concept that words that rhyme are the same “on the back of the word.” Then, using an interactive whiteboard, the teacher displays pictures of various rhyming words, such as frog and log and mat and bat, and the children repeat the words aloud. Next the youngsters are shown photos, on the whiteboard, of three classmates and school staff members. The teacher says a silly or nonsensical word (“Bomar”), and the student is asked to touch the photo of the student whose name rhymes with that word (“Omar”). If the student touches an incorrect photo, he or she will hear the teacher’s recorded voice say, “Try again.” If the student touches the correct photo, he or she will hear, “Great job, you did it!” The lesson continues until each class member has taken a turn.

The plan works well because it actively engages the children while considering their various learning styles and abilities. The visual/auditory learner can see and hear the lesson, the kinesthetic learner can physically participate in the activity and students with limited English proficiency will succeed because of the self-correcting recorded response.

Subject area: The subject area is language arts, with an emphasis on children learning to discriminate the sounds of language.

Standards: The lesson meets Georgia’s Pre-K Content Standards for Language Arts for phonological awareness LD2b, requiring that the student “repeats rhymes, poems and finger plays.” Moreover, it meets Georgia Kindergarten English Language Arts Standard ELAKR2a: “The student demonstrates the ability to identify and orally manipulate words and individual sounds within those spoken words. The student identifies and produces rhyming words in response to an oral prompt and distinguishes rhyming and non-rhyming words.”

As the lesson plan is designed for pre-kindergarten children, the assessment tool for pre-K children is the Content Standards Checklist; the assessment tool for kindergarteners is the Georgia Kindergarten Assessment Program – Revised (GKAP-R).

Resources: Interactive whiteboard, Boardmaker software for pictures of rhyming words, PowerPoint software for photos of students and staff members.