Teaching Phonemic Awareness With Green Eggs and Ham

Introduction: Green Eggs and Ham as a Literacy Tool

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

Phonemic Awareness and Alphabetic Knowledge

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 develop a sense of how sounds (phonemes) are used in spoken words. Green Eggs and Ham can be a good tool for providing many different but easy-to-grasp phonemes that students can differentiate as they hear the sounds and see the pictures that reinforce the ideas 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 helps boost their phonemic awareness levels (Ouellette and Haley 29).

Reading Dr. Seuss's 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 and Watkins).

Alignment With Common Core Standards

According to Common Core Standards, print concepts that should be demonstrated by first-grade students include 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 understand that "words are separated by spaces in print," 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 and punctuation ("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, the first page contains the words "I am Sam," and the second page contains the words "Sam I am." The third page has the speaker of the story calling out the antagonist's name 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 while showing them the pages as the story unfolds, so that children understand that reading proceeds from left to right. They can pair the images of the story with the words the teacher is speaking, providing meaningful context. By the final pages, the sentences become much longer and more complex, challenging students to follow the descriptions closely. The story also uses a variety of sentence types — exclamatory, interrogative, and declarative — and students can identify each one in keeping with first-grade Core Standards. 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 appears in print, speaking it aloud, repeating its sounds in segments, and asking students to pronounce the words as well. In this way, students can practice hearing and speaking sounds and receive examples of how sounds are blended to produce whole words.

Comprehension and Rhyme Skills

Comprehension skills that can be taught with this book include identifying characters and the mood of those characters based on their assertions and facial expressions shown in the illustrations. They can include identifying rhyming words and words that express emotion. They can also include identifying the subject of the story — such as "What is this story about?" "What is its title?" and "Who is the author?" The educator can show where information regarding the latter two questions can be found on the book, thereby teaching students how to locate and identify data presented on a book's cover and title page.

The most outstanding skill that can be demonstrated using this book is identifying rhyming words. Green Eggs and Ham is a great rhyming book because nearly every line contains a rhyme, and there are dozens of rhyme pairs repeated throughout the story. One exercise the teacher could use is to identify and count the number of rhyme pairs in the story and write them on the board for students to see. The teacher can then 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 skills students will need to become critical thinkers. Thus, Green Eggs and Ham can be a helpful tool for developing students' thinking skills. Another skill that can be reinforced is identifying words with similar consonant sounds.