Common Core and Students

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Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss is a terrific book for helping young learners develop phonemic awareness and for the teacher to help them decoding and encoding strategies. At the same time, it may be used in conformity with Common Core Standards so that students meet guidelines provided by the State.

As Ouellette and Haley point out, alphabetic knowledge and vocabulary can have a positive impact on phonemic awareness (29). When students better understand the letters of the alphabet and their common pairings, they are more likely to have a sense of how sounds (phenomes) are utilized in words that are spoken. Green Eggs and Ham can be a good tool for providing many different but easy to grasp phenomes that students can differentiate as they hear the sounds and see that pictures that reinforces the ideas that the sounds should convey. Segmenting (analyzing words for their sound components and breaking them down) is also a useful way for students to better develop their "oral vocabulary and alphabetic knowledge," which in turn assists them in boosting their phonemic awareness levels (Ouellette, Haley 29).

Reading Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham can be an effective way to help students segment sounds and come to a better understanding of how sounds go together to produce words and how words are used to convey complete thoughts. The sentences in the book are simple, with simple subjects followed by simple predicates. As the story unfolds, there is a great deal of repetition, which is helpful for allowing students to remember sounds, hear them over and over again, and enjoy the audible experience of rhyme and repetition in reading (Dahlin, Watkins).

According to Common Core Standards, print concepts that should be demonstrated by students in 1st grade are the "understanding of the organization and basic features of print," the ability to "follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page," the ability to "recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters," the ability to comprehend that "words are separated by spaces in print," and the ability to "recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet," and the ability to recognize the "distinguishing features of a sentence" -- such as capitalization, punctuation, etc. ("Core Standards"). Core Standards regarding phonological awareness include recognizing and producing rhyming words (of which there are many in Green Eggs and Ham -- fox, box, me, tree, house, mouse, am, Sam, ham, etc.) and blending sounds and segments of single-syllable words. They also include identifying short and long vowel sounds and being able to tell the difference between the two, practicing consonant blend sounds, and producing phonemes. This book can help the educator to touch on and reinforce all of these Standards.

For example, on the first page are the words "I am Sam," and on the second page are the words, "Sam I am." The third page has a the speaker of the story calling the name of the antagonist and identifying him as "Sam-I-am" and on the fourth page, Sam-I-am returns with the question, "Do you like green eggs and ham?" The teacher can read the book to the children, showing them the pages as the story unfolds, so that children understand that reading proceeds from left to right, and they can place the images of the story with the words that the teacher is speaking so that context is provided. By the last pages, the sentences become much longer and more complex and the students are challenged to follow the descriptions closely. The story uses a variety of sentences, too -- such as exclamatory sentences, interrogative sentences, and declarative sentences, and students can identify each one in keeping with 1st grade Core Standards.

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The images can act as signposts for the students and the narrative can provide clues about who is who and what the characters want. The teacher can emphasize each word as it is written, speaking it and repeating its sounds in segments and asking students to pronounce the words too. This way, the students can practice hearing sounds and speaking sounds and receive examples of how sounds are blended to produce whole words.

Comprehension skills that can be taught with this book include identifying characters, the mood of the characters based on assertions that they make and facial expressions that are provided in the images. They can include identifying rhyming words and words that express emotion. They can also include identifying the subject of the story -- as in, "What is this story about?" "What is its title?" "Who is the author?" The educator can show where information regarding the latter two questions can be found on the book and thus students can learn how to identify data in this manner.

The most outstanding skill that can be demonstrated in this book is identifying rhyme words. Green Eggs in Ham is a great rhyming book because every line has a rhyme and there are dozens of rhyme pairs that are repeated throughout the story. One exercise that the teacher could do is to identify and count the number of rhyme pairs in the story and write them on the board for the students to see. The teacher can ask questions, such as, "Which word rhymes with box?" or "Can you name some other words that rhyme with 'me'?" This type of exercise reinforces the skill that students will need to become critical thinkers. Thus, Green Eggs and Ham can be a helpful tool for developing the students' ability to enhance thinking skills. Another skill would be identifying words with similar consonant sounds.

Five examples of how this skill can be achieved using this book is in the identification of words that make the same sounds -- rhyming words, words with consonance and words with assonance. 1) Students could count the words along with the teacher, 2) group the words on the board, 3) see how some word groups overlap (they have parts that make similar sounds with a variety of words -- such as tree and train overlapping with me and rain, 4) they could think of their own words that can be added to these groups, and 5) they can write their own addition to the book and draw a picture to support their work.

All of this ties in with the 1st grade level because at this level students need to be able form more complex sounds by blending consonants. They should be able to identify long and short vowel sounds, which they can by comparing words like rain and train with ham and am. The students can also identify characteristics of a sentence, such as the first word being capitalized and different types of punctuation being used -- periods, question marks and exclamation marks.

In conclusion, Green Eggs and Ham is a good book to help students in developing phonemic awareness and to assist in decoding and encoding strategies that can be taught and reinforced. It can help reinforce the basic Common Core Standards of education for 1st grade students and provide them with a pleasurable experience, reinforcing lessons that they should have learned the previous year and allowing them to build on that foundation and grown their own knowledge base and skill level.

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