Have him or her read the list daily for a week or more. You can also use the Word Bank handout from All About Spelling level 3 for AI/AY to help him build up a visual memory for these words. You could make it a game where you shuffle a few AI words together, then take turns drawing a card, reading it, and putting it on the correct pile.Īny time you can make something into a game, kids tend to enjoy the learning process more. Then have your child try to read the words and sort them.
Show your child how to sound them out and then how you pronounce them in your region. Put all of the “regular” AY/AI words like pay and train in one pile, and then put the words where you pronounce the AI differently (as in words like mail and pair) in another pile. Have your child do an activity where he or she sorts the words into piles by how you pronounce the AY/AI sound. You could make up word cards on index cards for a bunch of the words. Then model for your child how to say each one. Let him or her know that some people pronounce these with a long ā sound too, but in your part of the world, you say the sounds differently. When your child is able to make most of these words fairly successfully, then go back and work on the words that end in l and r.
Here are some suggestions, but be sure to use words where AY and AI are clearly long for you: Play with the letter tiles and do short strings of words where you call out words for your child to spell and he or she switches out one or two tiles at a time. Help your student get the idea of how to spell the words that are a long ā sound in your accent first. So, that leaves only danger, chamber, and pastry. So they are le-thal and e-than, so the Es are long because they are open syllables. TH is a single phonogram, so they are not divided into T and H when the words are divided. Both have a short E, or in some pronunciations pretty may be pronounced “perty” and effect may be pronounced “uffect” ( schwa sound on the first syllable). Pretty and effect do not have long E sounds. The words haste through strange all have long A sounds because of the silent E doing its first job. I and O may say their long sounds when followed by two consonants. The words kind through gross have long I and O sounds because of the Find Gold rule. It is the third sound of O and O can say its third or fourth sounds whenever. The /oo/ sound of O (as in wolf, whom, tomb, and womb) is not the long sound of O. You can hear the third sound of U with our Phonogram Sounds app. The first nine words pull through pudding do not have a long U sound. Others, however, do not have long vowel sounds at all. Many of the words on this list have long vowel sounds for reasons that clearly follow phonics rules.
Activities to Teach Long Vowel SoundsĪre you interested in seeing how we teach the four long vowel patterns in All About Reading and All About Spelling? Here is a sampling for you to download and enjoy!Īs explained in this blog post, open syllables are not the only way to form long vowel sounds. Instead, teach these basic patterns to students incrementally, one at a time. I would not recommend overwhelming a beginning student by teaching these spellings all at once. But I would only recommend using the chart for reference, or with an older student who has already mastered most of these phonograms. Seeing these spellings all gathered in one place is enlightening for those of us who are already proficient readers and spellers. The chart below illustrates the most common ways to spell the long vowel sounds. So there you go-the four basic patterns for spelling long vowel sounds! Let’s Dive in a Little Deeper In these words, I or O are long before two consonants: k ind, g old, ch ild. In the word stroll, as in The emu went for a stroll, the letter O comes before two consonants and says its long vowel sound. I or O can be long when they come before two consonants.