Teaching Vowel Sounds

Learning short vowel sounds can be difficult for early readers.  Some children find it difficult to discriminate between the  short i sound (like in the word, inch) and short e sound (like in the word, elephant). In school I teach using a program called Fundations.  http://www.wilsonlanguage.com/programs/fundations/

What I like about this program is that you teach students to practice reading a letter, saying a key word/picture clue and then saying the sound the letter makes. For the most part the program uses short one syllable words that are not difficult to pronounce as their key words.

With the vowel sounds in particular I have a story and hand motion to go along with the picture clue to further reach that multi-sensory approach we talked about a few weeks ago. 

I would like to share my silly stories with you in hopes that you can use them with your children.

A-Apple-/a/

The letter a is one scaredy cat.  He is afraid of little kids trying to scare him.  If a kids sneaks up behind him and yells "boo" he will make his sound which is /a/. 

I would lift up both of my hands as if I was scared when I make the /a/ sound.  Kids enjoy scaring the letter and yelling the sound.  Play it up and hide the letter and sneak it out so the kids can scare him. 

E-Edd-/e/

(you can show kids a picture of a character named Ed or a picture of an elephant for this one.  But which every you choice I use that picture in the story.

Here is a Ed the Elephant and he has a big problem.  He doesn't hear very well.  Let's try saying hi to Ed-have your child say hi .  When the child says hi he doesn't hear them and he says /eh/? Hold you hand up to your ear while saying the sound

Again play up the story and have the kids say hi louder and louder each time.

I-Itch-/i/

The Fundation cards have a picture of a monkey scratching.  You can have a picture of an inchworm or an insect.

I use the character on the card and tell the class that this monkey has fleas.  The fleas make the monkey very itchy.  Scratch your head of arm and make the /i/ sound.  The monkey makes the /i/ sound because being itchy is very icky.

O-Octopus-/o/

This octopus is going to the doctor.  When she goes to the doctor, the doctor asks her to open open her mouth and say /o/. I point around my mouth and show my kids how my mouth even looks like the letter o while I say that sound. 

While reviewing the letter I ask my kids to open up and say /o/ (seriously just like at the doctor's office)

U-up-/u/

I tell my students a story about when I was younger-true story too :)

When I was little, my brothers and I used to jump up and down on our beds have a pillow fight.  Well, this one time my big brother hit me pretty hard in the stomach with a pillow and the sound that I made was /u/.  I hold my stomach and double over.  I also show my students that the shape of my doubled over stomach is just like the letter u, it curves in. 

I hope this helps you with another way to teach your kiddos their vowel sounds. 

Vowel Power

The Power of Vowels! Yesterday I got on the topic of vowels with my son, how we got on this topic I have no idea.  I started to talk to him about R-Controlled vowels and how vowels are very special and can sound differently. After our conversation it got me thinking about sharing why and how we teach vowels-besides just their sounds. 



Here's a little background information for you;

The alphabet contains 26 letters, 5 of these letters are vowels (a,e,i,o,u) and the rest are consonants, except y which can be both.

A vowel sound is a sound that is made by allowing one breath of air to flow out of the mouth without closing the mouth or throat.

A consonant sound is made by blocking air from flowing out of the mouth with your teeth, lips, tongue or palate.

Y is a consonant when it is found at the beginning of a word (yellow) and a vowel when it is at the end of a word. 

Y makes the long i sound when it is at the end of a one syllable word (by, my, cry)
Y makes the long e sound when it is found at the end of a two syllable word (baby, crazy)

When children begin to learn their letters and sounds short vowel sounds are typically taught first. (cat, met, hut, hot, hit)

Now, on to teaching what the vowels are-it is important for children to be able to identify which letters are the vowels for a number of reasons.

• Every word in the English language has at least one vowel in it
• Every syllable has a vowel in it
• Children will learn to identify syllables in words in order to decode and spell-all by knowing where the vowels are located in the word. 
• Children will learn that vowels can come as teams (ai, oa, ee ...)
• Children will learn that vowels can be controlled by other letters (ar, or, ir..)

A song to help learn the names of the vowels;

The Vowel Song

(song to the tune of BINGO)

There are 5 vowels in the alphabet let's sing them all together

A-E-I-O-U

A-E-I-O-U

A-E-I-O-U

and sometimes Y's a vowel too.

Tips

·        Hold the sounds and blend

Mmmmmmaaaaaaap

·        Letter/Word/Picture clues

·        Use hand signs for the long and short sounds.

Stretch out arms long for the long sound and bring hands in quick and together for the short sound. 

·        Look for patterns and sort (word families-at, it, on, up, en). 

·        Use a mirror to show mouth position

Use symbols to show long and short vowel sounds

 

Multisensory Approach

A Multisensory approach to learning uses more than one sense at a time. There is an integration of auditory, visual, tactile (touch) and kinesthetic (movement) learning elements within a given lesson or activity. Here are some examples of what each sense might look like;

Visual-the use of posters, picture clues, video, visual maps, diagrams

Auditory-incorporating music, singing, rhymes, audio tones, chants, clapping and dialogue, anything that involves the ear. Students may also chorally read together, read aloud, listen to the teacher or another student throughout the lesson.

Tactile-Anything that involves touching, manipulating and moving letters, touching textured objects (letters made of sandpaper, writing in salt or shaving cream), using coins, counters or small objects.

Kinesthetic- learning through motion and doing, using both fine and gross motor skills. Learning hand motions, jumping on mats, dancing, say a letter out loud while  writing the letter it in the air.

What's awesome about a multisensory approach to learning is that it is fun and works for every type of learner and can easily be done at HOME!  

Stay tuned for activities to incorporate multisensory learning with your family.

Leveled Books

It's that time of the year where teachers are reading with our children trying to find out what their individual reading levels are. There are a lot of different leveled reading programs available for teachers to use in their classrooms.  The reading program I use in my district is different from the program used in my children's school.

Let's start with what is a reading level and why it is used.

If a book is too hard for your child, they can become easily frustrated and discouraged causing your child to shut down. A book that is too easy can be boring and  not challenging enough. Think of it all like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks is looking for things that are just right for her, things that are comfortable and familiar. Knowing your child's reading level is the key to success and the best way to grow as a reader.  Your child's reading level contains books that are just right, not too hard or not too easy, but challenging enough to learn from.

There is a wide range of reading abilities that exist within grade levels and age groups.  Reading levels are assessed using programs used in your child's school.  Here are some of the popular reading systems used in schools today;
Fountas & Pinnell
Reading Recovery
DRA
The Lexile Framework for Reading
Reading A to Z

Here is a Correlation Chart showing  Reading Assessment comparisons.

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Once your child's teacher has provided you with your child's reading level now what do you do? How can you support them at home? 

You may not have to run out and by books, below I have included a website that lists popular children's books broken down by reading level.  Check and see if you have their "Just Right" book at home or pick some titles your child might like and check out the books from your local library.

http://www.the-best-childrens-books.org/guided-reading-levels.html

Happy Reading!

Asking Questions

Parents asking the questions 

I don't ask my kids questions every time we read, some times I just want the story to flow and let my kids focus on my fluency, expression and character voices.

So when is a good time to ask kids questions about books at home and where do you start?

In my opinion try questioning one to two times a week would be great, that's if you are reading daily. When my kids were younger say around the ages of 2 and 3 my questions were mainly based on the pictures found in the stories such as; what is the animal doing, how many apples do you see, how do you think they are feeling, why do you think so and so is doing that? Or even more basic just asking your child to describe what they see in the picture. Later on build off the pictures and start asking about the story; Who are the characters? What just happened? Why did they do that? What would you have done? What do you think will happen next?

Kids asking the questions 

As your child gets the hang of answering your questions have them ask you the questions. This requires some higher level thinking- they have to first know the answer and then in return know how to ask the question. They love this because they feel like they are important and have some ownership. I tell my kids to ask me questions to see if I was paying attention to what was gong on. 

Once again start off small, have them ask you questions about pictures or even just one sentence from the story. Your kids may need lots of modeling to understand how to ask questions so take it easy. 

Trying to pick parts of a story that would be easy to ask a question about, like at the beginnning when a character is just being introduced. 

Have fun with this, if you are up for it use a pretend microphone to let the kids talk into- we have an echo mic from the dollar store that adds some flare to or story time. 

Vocabulary

I have been reading the same Berenstain Bear book, New Neighbors for five nights in a row to my two children. If you are not familiar with this story it's about the bear family getting new neighbors. The story talks about a real estate bear putting up a sold sign on the house next door. Well tonight it finally dawned on me, do my kids know what a real estate person is, or bear in this case. Well I paused my reading and asked if they knew what one was and sure enough they had no clue. So I took a moment to explain that a real estate person was someone who sells houses. I compared it to them selling lemon aid (which is something they have been dying to do). I also took the opportunity to talk about how they can figure out what the word means by thinking about how it is used in the story and looking at the picture of the real estate bear.

Why don't I do this more often? I talk about books with my kids all the time but sometimes I take it for granted that they may not know what all the words mean. We love Fancy Nancy books because the main character teaches us " fancy" words.

So tonight I am setting a goal for myself. A goal to talk more about vocabulary and a goal to encourage my kids to ask about words that they do not know. I encourage you to join me.

Happy reading!