Week 5, lesson 2 New Grapheme "u_e" - Phonics Phase 5, unit 1 - Lesson plan

In the second lesson of Week 5, young learners are introduced to the new split digraph as part of their phonics education. The objective of the lesson is to familiarize the students with this tricky grapheme, which is similar to the previously learned and digraphs. To aid the learning process, characters Oon and Unicorn are used as mnemonic devices. The lesson starts with a "Quickwrite" activity, where children are asked to write down the grapheme corresponding to a spoken phoneme on their whiteboards and then display their answers for the class.

The teaching segment of the lesson involves writing the word "tune" on the board, with sound buttons beneath the and , and a swooping line connecting the and to highlight the split digraph. The students are reminded that the modifies the sound of to say its letter name, sounding like /yoo/. After practicing decoding and blending with "tune," the lesson continues with other words like "rule," where the split digraph rule is applied. If the rule doesn't yield the correct pronunciation, the children are taught to use the long /oo/ sound instead. More examples like "prune" and "mule" are used for reinforcement.

During the practice phase, an engaging "Spot the Fake" activity is introduced, where children identify real and nonsense words written on coins, sorting them into a treasure chest or a bin accordingly. The lesson then moves on to an application activity, where pairs of children use a provided resource to decode words and match them to the correct phoneme or pictophone representation. Finally, the lesson concludes with mini whiteboard work, where the children are asked to write dictated words and sentences, such as "I toot on my flute," along with other words like "brute," "cute," and "tube," to apply their new knowledge of the grapheme.