the word “road”), so I wanted to make sure that they were words students would need to spell often. Students are expected to memorize those words (i.e. When I chose target weekly spelling words for the vowel team weeks of my From Sounds to Spelling phonics program, I intentionally chose highly useful words. Students simply need a lot of practice with vowel team words, and that takes time. There often isn’t one solid “rule” to explain why “ee” is used in a word (vs. Learning words with vowel teams requires some degree of memorization. the “ea” team making the long e or short e sound).Īgain, the vowel teams take a long time to master, so you will see students who need more practice even beyond 2nd grade. We also cover vowel teams in 2nd grade, and I introduce a few more exceptions (i.e. But it’s usually late 1st grade when we work on decoding (reading) AND encoding (spelling) words with vowel teams. For example, I point out that the ay in “day” makes the long a sound. We may also discuss them in mid-1st grade, as they come up in the context of reading or high frequency words. I usually introduce vowel teams at the end of 1st grade. There are many different vowel teams, and mastery often takes years! (So if your students struggle with vowel teams…you’re not alone!) However, I prefer to teach vowel teams after working on silent e, because silent e feels a bit more “straightforward” to me. I’ve heard that, in some places, vowel teams are taught before silent e. I teach vowel teams after students have demonstrated mastery of: Sometimes vowel teams are also called “vowel digraphs.” I prefer the term “vowel team” because digraph = 2 letters, and some vowel teams (like igh) include more than one letter. One tricky thing about long u is that the sound can be the name of the letter (as in the word “few”) OR the /oo/ sound (as in the word “tube”). Long u vowel teams include: ue, eu, ew (examples: argue, feud, pew) Long o vowel teams include: oe, oa, ow (examples: toe, boat, blow) Long i vowel teams include: ie, igh (examples: pie, right). I typically only teach ea, ee, and ie in 1st and 2nd grade. Long e vowel teams include: ea, ee, ey, ie, ei (examples: seat, feet, key, thief, receive) I typically only teach ai and ay in 1st and 2nd grade, but I point out eigh or ey when they appear in the context of a text or word we’re studying. Long a vowel teams include: ai, ay, eigh, ey (examples: paid, say, neigh, they) In this post, we’re going to focus mostly on the long sounds – but I do also teach students about words where vowel teams do not make long vowel sounds. Often, the vowel sound for a vowel team is long (like the long e in “neat”), but sometimes vowels work together to make other sounds (like the short e in “bread”). A vowel team is a spelling pattern that uses two or more letters to represent a single vowel sound.
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