Resource: Seven Selfish Shellfish

Like poems, tongue twisters are a type of wordplay that correlates strongly with success in early reading. The more exposure young children have to fun language games, the better they are able to tune in to language tasks at school. It's no coincidence: activities like this help strengthen children's grasp of oral language, which goes hand in hand with learning to read.

To learn to read and write, children must shift their attention from the meaning of language to the appearance and sounds of individual words. For instance, they will need to notice the sound structure of spoken words: their length, their similarities and differences, and the discreet sounds (called phonemes) that go together for each word.

Tongue twisters help children focus on the beginnings of words and are a good way for them to listen for alliteration, the repetition of consonants in two or more consecutive words. Noting words that begin with the same sound is one of the first steps in building phonological awareness—the ability to pay attention to the individual sounds of speech. In fact, saying "seven selfish shellfish" accurately is a real feat of phonological processing! The tongue twister challenges the speaker to concentrate on the sounds that each word begins and ends with. The two different "s" sounds (/s/ vs. /sh/) require different mouth positions, and it is difficult to go from one to the other. This is what makes it a tongue twister!

Phonological awareness includes a whole range of abilities that have to do with focusing on oral language. Children who are phonologically aware are able to pay attention to the rhythms and rhymes of spoken language; they can treat a word as an object to be played with (taken apart and put back together), in addition to understanding what it means. They notice that some words are short and some are long, with three or four syllables, or beats. They notice that rhyming words have the same ending, and that some words have the same beginnings. Eventually, they will need to listen for each and every sound (phoneme) within a word and to represent that sound with a letter (or letters) of the alphabet.

Typically, phonological awareness begins to emerge well before a child is ready to start exploring written language. The more familiar children are with wordplay and games that spotlight the sounds within words, the more prepared they are to understand the alphabetic principle of English, which is the key to success in early reading and spelling.

• Invite your students to try saying the tongue twister with the people in this segment. Write the words on a chalkboard or chart, and think aloud about what the phrase means. What’s a shellfish? What would it mean to be a selfish shellfish? See if any volunteers would like to try illustrating this phrase. What letter do you see at the beginning of each word? Can anyone tell why these words are so hard to say? Ask your students to take turns saying the phrase—remember that it’s a challenge to be enjoyed; having fun with mistakes is part of the tongue-twister experience.
• See if you can create your own class tongue twisters, perhaps beginning with a familiar character’s name (for example, Leona Lion’s lizard likes Lionel).
• Ask your students to find out if their parents or siblings know any other tongue twisters. Most people know the ones beginning, "Peter Piper . . ." and "She sells seashells . . . ." If students are interested, create and illustrate a class tongue-twister book.
• Introduce the game of "syllable deletion" to help your students play with words as objects: Say "shellfish." Now say it again, without the "fish." Now say "selfish." Say it again without the "sell." Other good words to take apart include: "cowboy," "toothbrush," "football," "strawberry," "watermelon," "flashlight," etc. Have students clap the syllables (beats) in each of these words, then play the syllable deletion game.
• For more fun with tongue twisters, see:
  Six Sick Sheep by Joanna Cole
  Oh Say Can You Say by Dr. Seuss
  Busy Buzzing Bumblebees and Other Tongue Twisers by Alvin Schwartz