Lesson plan
How Many Letters?
Learning Objectives
Students will be able to identify how many letters are in their names.
The adjustment to the whole group lesson is a modification to differentiate for children who are English learners.
Introduction
(5 minutes)
- Write your name on the whiteboard or chart paper.
- Ask the students if they know how many letters are in your name.
Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling
(5 minutes)- Demonstrate counting the letters in your name.
- Tell your students that different words have different amounts of letters in them.
- Point to the alphabet chart and find the letters in your name. Explain that the alphabet chart is a useful tool to use when looking for letters.
- Say, “Today we are going to count the letters in our names and practice finding those letters on our alphabet chart.”
- Display a chart with numbered lines (one to nine) and write your name on the chart. Ask students to point to the number of letters in your name.
Guided Practice
(10 minutes)- Pass out sentence strips and have students write their name on the strip. Have students count the number of letters in their first name.
- Invite students to tape their strip onto the number chart.
- Ask students to notice which number is the most popular. Have students notice some names are short and some are long.
Independent working time
(15 minutes)- Pass out the Which Letter? worksheet. Ask students to color in the letters in their names and record how many letters are in their names.
Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling
(5 minutes)- Demonstrate counting the letters in your name.
Differentiation
Support:
- Prewrite a student name on a sentence strip and work with them to count the letters and identify each letter on the alphabet chart.
- Work with a smaller group of students to find the total number of letters in the same words (e.g., class or apple).
- As a group, practice one-to-one correspondence when counting.
- Review numbers names and counting as needed.
Enrichment:
- For advanced students, have them complete a worksheet for their middle and last names in addition to their first name.
- Encourage students to use complete sentences when sharing with a partner.
- Ask students to practice prediciting the number of letters in their middle and last names.
Assessment
(5 minutes)- Collect the worksheets and assess if students were able to accurately find and count the letters in their name.
- Students can switch worksheets with a friend and count the letters in their friend’s name.
Review and closing
(5 minutes)- Encourage students to count and spell the letters in their family members names at home that night.
- Remind students that using an alphabet chart can help them to identify letters and letter sounds.
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