Overview
The children will explore the room to find picture cards as they practice saying the /e/ sound in words such as excellent, explorer, and egg.

Literacy Activities
Be excellent explorers

• Help the children make binoculars by taping toilet paper rolls (or rolled half-sheets of paper) and attaching a string.
• Place the picture cards around the room .
• While emphasizing the target sound, tell the children to use the pretend binoculars to explore the room for pictures of things that start with the letter E.
• When a child finds a word or a picture beginning with E, have him or her say, “I found an ___.”
• Tell the children to write the letter E on the picture and then place it in an envelope.
• Repeat the activity using word cards, and have the children circle the letter E on the word cards (support as needed).

The exploding envelope

• Place uppercase E and lowercase e letter cards in an envelope.
• Make the Es explode out of the envelope by turning it upside down and shaking it quickly so the Es fall out. 
• Let the children examine the Es with a magnifying glass after they explode from the envelope.
• Have the children gather up the letter cards and put them in the envelope while they say, ”I put an E in the envelope” or “Will the envelope with Es explode?”
• Repeat the activity using picture and word cards beginning with the E sound (optional).

Pretend to be exhausted

• Comment on the things the children did (e.g., explore for elephants, examine Es, make envelopes explode) and say, “Wow, that’s exhausting! Are you explorers exhausted?” You may want to explain that to be exhausted means you are very tired.

More Practice
Identify, blend, and manipulate sounds

• Have children identify the beginning, middle, and ending sounds of words by tapping their head (beginning), their shoulders (middle), and their hips (end) (e.g., cat = /c/ tap head, /a/ tap shoulders, /t/ tap hips).
  • red = r + e + d
  • let = l + e + t
  • pen = p + e + n
  • end = e + n + d
• With word blending cards, have the children make new words by changing the vowel or either of the consonants:
  • Change the beginning sound: pet → net; red → bed
  • Change the ending sound: let → led; met → men
  • Change the middle sound: set → sat; pen → pan; net → not

Write the target letter

• Help the children write the uppercase letter E and lowercase letter e using the writing practice page. 
• Let the children draw pictures of things that start with E that they found while exploring.