How to Teach Long and Short Vowels At Home

Teaching Vowels and Consonants

Phonological awareness, in a nutshell, is the awareness of syllables or phonemes.  A phoneme is one of the smallest units of speech that distinguishes one sound from another. Phonological awareness is awareness of letter sounds and names and knowing how to decode these sounds and names when reading and writing.  

Phonological awareness is the first step to reading 

Phonological awareness happens in steps.  The first step is knowing that language is composed of words.  Next is knowing that words are made up of word parts, better known as syllables.  The last step is learning that syllables are made up of phonemes or individual sounds.  Basically, phonological (phonetic) awareness helps kids decode new words and remember old ones, which plays a part in reading comprehension and spelling.

Teaching long and short vowel sounds

In teaching long vowel sounds just remember, the long vowel says it’s name.  The same sound you make when saying the letter is the same sound the letter makes in a word.

For short vowel sounds, take a look at this short video featured on Reading Rockets that uses motion to remember short vowel sounds.  https://youtu.be/kJMsWoVeBjk  

(for just vowels, you can stop the video at 6:50,  Keep going if you want to know more about teaching consonant sounds.

That was a neat video wasn’t it?

Teaching Terms you may want to know

Being a homeschool parent you may feel a little more confident and gain a better understanding of how to teach your child when you know a few basic teaching terms of the profession.  Here are a few terms to familiarize yourself with.

• Grapheme:  the sum of all written letters and letter combinations that represent one phoneme. Ex ch, sh, th, p, t k, ea,igh
• Phoneme: one of the smallest units of speech that distinguishes one utterance from another
• Phonemic awareness:  The insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes
• Phonetic instruction:  Instruction in phonics is instruction that stresses sound -symbol relationships.  It is used especially in beginning reading instruction.
• Phonetics: pertaining to representing the sounds of speech with a set of distinct symbols, each denoting a single sound.
• Phonological awareness: the whole spectrum from primitive awareness of speech sounds and rhythms to rhyme awareness and sound similarities; at the highest level, awareness of syllables or phonemes.
• Phonology: the sound system of a language and how it is represented with an alphabet code.

Teaching vowels activities

Literacy Mobility offers activities for teaching vowels vowels