Module 3 - Consonants

Introduction

The elements of spoken English (phonemes) and of written English (graphemes), and of the correspondences between them, form the basis for the training. We intend to develop the children's attention to speech and writing by jointly perceiving spoken language as a physiological event, and discovering the ways in which alphabetic writing represents a vast number of spoken words with a small inventory of written symbols.

Objectives

1. The children will consciously engage with the symbols of written English (graphemes), and discover the (unlimited) possibilities of how those symbols can be used to represent spoken English.

2. The children learn to identify phonemes and graphemes, and gain increasing confidence in talking about and reflecting on these things. They learn to formulate their observations and express conclusions in accurate terms.

3. The children know the technical terms phoneme, grapheme, consonant, vowel, digraph, split digraph.

Materials

• Blackboard / whiteboard, pens (blue, red)

• Hand mirror s for the children

• Pupils' exercise books, coloured pens/pencils

Activities

Phonemes and graphemes

Children, today I want you to think and tell me what you already know about the English language, and the letters we use to write it.

Can you tell me what the difference is between a sound and a letter?

Sounds: are spoken
Letters: are written

N.B. If the children spontaneously refer to phonemes and graphemes, go with that terminology, otherwise introduce it.

Teacher: If we were to watch our mouths very closely when we speak – if we were to turn on something like an inner camera – we could see that there are different kinds of phonemes: those where our breath is partly blocked – those are the consonants, and those where our breath is not blocked or obstructed at all – the vowels.

The teacher writes the letters p t k on the board (in blue).

These letters spell sounds that are like explosions. You need a lot of air to make them and at the same time you make an obstruction in your mouth. When you open it, the sounds go bang. Let’s all say them with a hand held in front of our face: /p t k/

Can you can feel the puff as the sounds explode?

Can you feel where the obstruction in your mouth is when you say these sounds? /p/ (the lips), /t/ (the tongue behind the upper teeth), /k/ (the tongue in the back of the mouth).

Teacher writes b d g on board.

Now hold a finger across your throat while we say /p t k/ again, then /b d g/ - what’s the difference? Yes, when we say /b d g/ you can feel your voice box, the larynx, vibrating.

For all six of those sounds, we let the air out just through our mouths, but if we let the air out through our noses as well, we get /m n ŋ/ - we call them nasal sounds.

Teacher writes m n on board, then asks: What’s different about how we write the /ŋ/ sound? Yes – we have to use two letters, ng, instead of one. And what do we call <ng> when we use them to write one sound? Yes – a digraph.

Now I’m going to say the rest of the consonant phonemes one by one, and I want you to tell me which ones we can mostly write with one letter, and which we have to use digraphs for. Tell me the letter or digraph that writes each phoneme.

Teacher says in turn (and writes answers on board): /f v s z l r h w j θ ð ʧ ʤ ʃ/.
N.B. The phonetic symbols should not be written on the board, only the answers:

The symbol /j/ represents the ‘y’ sound at the beginning of ‘yell’ and ‘union’. The list omits phoneme /ʒ/, as in the middle of ‘vision’ etc., because it is rare and has no predominant spelling. There is also no point at this stage in introducing the complications of trigraphs and four-letter graphemes.