OnTrack Reading

The title refers to the short vowel sounds, but many teachers no longer use that term, if my client base is any indication. Furthermore, most of my clients have no idea what is even meant by the phrase vowel sound, so it’s hardly surprising that they’re confused about the sounds represented by the letters a, e, i, o and u.

Here is a worksheet that you can download as a PDF file called First Vowel Sounds that you can use to help your child automatically recall the short vowel sounds: Download the worksheet First Vowel Sounds

Two separate concepts are implied by the worksheet’s title, First Vowel Sound. The main concept is that of a vowel sound itself, and here is an effective way to teach it to your child (and probably to yourself, too.) Tell your child that vowel sounds give words their volume and then ask if he knows what you mean by volume on the television. Every five year old has heard a parent yell “Turn down the volume!” enough times that they will understand what an adult means by volume. Again state that vowel sounds are the sounds that give words their volume and proceed with the following demonstration.

Ask your child to tell you the sounds in the word fish. By now you should have given him the four tests and you will know whether he can segment fish. Hopefully, he will tell you /f/-/i/-/sh/ are the sounds. Then ask him if he knows which sound is the vowel sound. He might say /i/, or he might not. Tell him if he doesn’t know. Then tell him you are both going to try saying fish without the vowel sound. In other words, you’re both going to say fsh (/f/sh/; no /i/ sound) and you’re both going to say it as loud as you can. Incidentally, the presence of other people within hearing distance helps make the point here.

Spend a few seconds yelling fsh and then tell him you’re going to put the /i/ sound back in and yell fish as loud as you both can. I have had lots of kids yelling fsh as loud as they possibly could in my office, but to this day not one has dared let loose with full volume on fish. They immediately realize that the /i/ makes fish potentially much louder.

Reiterate the point that it’s that little /i/, the vowel sound, that makes fish so much louder than fsh and then tell your child that all of the sounds that add volume to words are vowel sounds and that the quieter sounds are called consonant sounds. You can, if you want, experiment with words with other vowel sounds, such as toy without /oy/, cow without /ow/ and her without /er/, explaining that /oy/, /ow/ and /er/ are vowel sounds also.

At this point in the explanation of vowel sounds, I point to a long list of 19 vowel sounds in the OnTrack Reading curriculum that is pasted on one side of the table and tell my clients that those are the vowel sounds in English words and that we will be studying all of them. Following this demonstration and explanation, my clients (and their parents) finally have some concept of what is meant by a vowel sound.

The second concept implied by the title of the worksheet is that the vowel sounds /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ form a class. This class is called the first vowel sound, a term that has exactly the same meaning as the older short vowel sound. The old long sound will later be termed the second vowel sound. Just as we once learned two classes of vowel sounds, short and long, your child should learn two classes of vowel sounds, first and second.

Why the change in terminology? Well, first of all most children don’t learn the older terminology in school any longer, so it’s not asking them to discard something. But more important, the terminology first and second leads logically to third, and even fourth vowel sounds. And, indeed, the letters a, i, o and u all have at least a third vowel sound associated with them, but more on that later.

Now, the purpose of the worksheet you downloaded here is to quickly train your child to know the first vowel sounds while also training him to think of them as a class with similar characteristics. The first characteristic that they share is that they are typically the sound used in the center of a three letter word, such as cat and hot. To make that point in a subtle manner, the key words for each of the sounds are the three letter words, cat, net, sit, hot and cut, all with the vowel spelling in the center of a three letter word that they should be able to decode.

Here’s how to use the worksheet. Go over the key words to see that your child knows each of them and then have him say /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ as you point to the letter next to each word. Then move to the first line and have him do it again, letting him glance at the key words if necessary. Then try the second line, which mixes them up a bit. Again, let him look at the key words.

By now, you’ll have noticed that your child is struggling with one or two of the letters more than the others. Say he keeps saying /u/ for the letter a. Tell him he’s having trouble with the /a/ sound and that you’re going to try the /a/ row. (Reminder, /a/ means you’re saying the sound, not the letter name.) Go to the third row which starts with the letter a and repeats the letter a every other letter.

As your child goes over the /a/ row, note again which of the other letters he struggles over and then say you’re going to have him try, say, the /o/ row and go to the row starting with the letter o. Practice this for just two or three minutes and praise any obvious progress. Then put it aside and return to it later for an additional two to three minutes. If you continue this process over just a few days, you will see your child automating the process of saying the correct sound when he looks at its associated letter without any longer having to look at the key words. And, he will begin to think of them as a class of sounds because they are always being practiced together and being referred to by the common terminology, first vowel sounds.

Nearly every client of OnTrack Reading manages to learn the first vowel sounds by the time they’ve returned for the following week’s lesson using this worksheet, so give it a try. The end result will be that your child knows the sounds and no longer has to look up at the ceiling and visualize an octopus and then say /o/ to himself before returning to the text to read a word like lots or plot. Incidentally, none of the reading curricula I discuss in here use pictures as cues for individual sounds. Doing so is counter-productive.

Next: Explaining Split Vowel Spellings, or return to the OnTrack Home Page