Teaching Consonants and Vowels: Phonics Rules for Teachers Episode 3

In episode 3 of Phonics Rules for Teachers (and How the Heck to Teach 'Em), learn all about consonants and vowels, why we can't just call AEIOU vowels and call it as day, and specific strategies for how to teach them in your classroom using a science of reading approach.

A classroom teacher with 10 years of experience, Martha Moore hosts the Phonics Rules for Teachers Podcast. Drawing from her personal journey, she shares insights on transitioning from traditional teaching methods to a phonics-centered approach and the impact it has on students' reading and writing.

Each week , Martha shares a simple phonics rule, strategy, or background information and how you can teach it in your classroom.

Transcript

Consonants and vowels: what's the difference? Why does it actually matter if students understand this and how do you teach it? We're going to cover all of that.

Today, welcome to Episode Three of "Phonics Rules for Teachers and How the Heck to Teach Them". I'm Martha and today we are going to be talking about the difference between consonants and vowels, why it's so important for your students to know the difference, what EX L are consonants and vowels, and how the heck to teach them. If you've already checked out my last video on letter names and letter sounds, then you have a great background knowledge for what we're going to talk about today. If you haven't or you're not super familiar with the ideas of letter names or letter sounds, I highly recommend checking out that video as well.

If I asked you to tell me all of the vowels, you would probably say A, E, I, O, U, and if you were feeling really fancy, you might even say "and sometimes Y". And if I asked you to tell me the consonants, you'd probably say all the other letters. This is both correct and not correct. While it is generally true that those letters represent vowel sounds and those letters represent consonant sounds, we can just categorize A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y as vowel letters and all the rest of them as consonants and call it a day. The idea of vowels and consonants goes a little bit deeper than that. When we talk about vowels and consonants, we are actually referring to the sounds that a specific letter or letters represent. When we're talking about vowels, we are talking about sounds, not necessarily specific letters. And while certain letters do represent vowel sounds very frequently, there are times that letters that we consider vowels also represent consonant sounds, and there are times that consonants also represent vowel sounds.

So you might be wondering, okay, but how do we tell the difference between vowel sounds and consonant sounds? A vowel sound is a sound that is produced when the mouth is open and the sound is not blocked at all by the lips, the teeth, or the tongue. Vowel sounds can be sustained or held out or sung. A consonant sound is any sound that, when it's produced, is blocked in some way by either the lips, the teeth, or the tongue. Let's look at some examples. Let's take a look at our short vowel sounds, and as I'm making the sounds, you are welcome to make them with me. You will notice that your mouth is open wide when you're making this sound and you can also hold out the sound for a long time. Let's take a look: A, E, I, O, U. In contrast, when we make consonant sounds, our mouth is going to be blocked in some way. Let's take a look at a few examples of these as well: C, D, F, M. You might be thinking, well, some of those consonant sounds you can hold out, for example, "M". That is true, but if you notice, my mouth is not wide open. The bottom line is this: vowel sounds are sounds where our mouth is completely unblocked and wide opened; consonant sounds, our mouth is blocked in some way.

Honestly, this is actually great news for helping our students understand the English language. If we simply assign the term "consonant" to certain letter symbols and then assign the term "vowel" to certain letter symbols, it makes it really confusing when we look at words like "onion" where I is representing the consonant sound y, or in the word "snow" where the W is helping the O make the long o sound. When we understand vowels and consonants as sounds, the English language starts to make a lot more sense.

Now, we're going to have a little crash course on vowels and consonants. Let's start with vowels. English has 15 vowel sounds that can be spelled 28 ways. Vowel sounds can be spelled with one letter or they could be spelled with multiple letters. Vowels that are spelled with multiple letters are called vowel digraphs or vowel teams. Both of these terms are absolutely correct; it just might depend on where you come from which term you use. Vowels are very important because every syllable in the English language must have only one vowel sound. Next week, we will dive deeper into syllables so if you're interested in that, just make sure you come back next week. Since every word in English must be made up of at least one syllable, every word in English must have at least one vowel sound. If students know this, they're much less likely to write the word "help" like this, and more likely to write it like this, because they will know that there needs to be some kind of symbol to represent a vowel sound in that word.

Now, let's take a crash course on consonants. The English language has 24 consonant sounds. These can also be spelled with a single letter or multiple letters. And consonants can be grouped into three categories: voiced, unvoiced, and nasal. In unvoiced sounds, we only use the breath to produce these sounds. Some examples of unvoiced sounds are "th." With voiced sounds, we use our voice to make those sounds. If you put your hand on your throat while making a voiced sound, you will feel little vibration or a little bit of movement right here. Some examples of voiced sounds are "d" and "v." For nasal sounds, our mouths are closed and the sound mostly comes out of our nose, hence the name nasal sounds. Some examples of nasal sounds are "m" and "n". Students don't necessarily need to know these three terms; however, this is helpful information for certain letters as I mentioned when we were talking about teaching letter sounds and letter names. When we're teaching sounds, it's helpful for students to focus on what their mouth is doing, so sometimes it might be appropriate to mention that a sound is voiced or unvoiced, or that the sound is coming out of our nose. It can also be helpful for specific letters, such as the digraph "th." These two letters can represent both a voiced and unvoiced sound. For example, in "breath," "th" is unvoiced, but in "breathe," "th" is voiced. So, when we're learning this digraph, we typically have a chat about voiced and unvoiced sounds and feel our throat when we make each sound and see if we can tell the difference.

Now that we've had all of that background information, you're probably wondering, great, but how the heck do we teach it? So here we go. I have four ways that you can ensure that your students understand consonants and vowels:

1. Identify letters or spelling patterns as representing consonant or vowel sounds. When you first teach a new sound or a new spelling pattern, identify with your students or better yet, have them identify whether it is a consonant or a vowel sound. For example, if you are teaching about the letter P and talking about how P represents the P sound, you can talk about how "p" is a consonant sound and it is represented by the letter P.
2. Students should know that A, E, I, O, and U typically represent vowel sounds. It's just important to focus on vowels as sounds and not just a specific letter.
   Number two: Daily sound drill warm-ups. Each day at the beginning of your phonics lesson, take two to three minutes to do a sound drill with your students. You can create a very simple Google slide or PowerPoint to do this. This is what mine looks like: Put one letter or spelling pattern in the middle of the screen, and as you click through the slides, students will make the letter sounds that that symbol represents. You can either group all of the vowel sounds together and all of the consonant sounds together, or you could make it more engaging and have students stand up when it is a vowel and sit down when it is a consonant as they're also making the sound. If you've already learned more than one sound for a spelling pattern or a letter, you can add a little two or a little three, and then students can say all of the sounds that that letter or spelling pattern represents. I always encourage my students to start with the most common sound and work our way to the least common sound.
   3.  Map words and make sure to identify the consonant and the vowel sounds. Word mapping helps students learn words and connect spelling patterns to the sounds they make in words. It is a great strategy for developing reading and writing skills and to make sure our students pay close attention to the letters in the words that they are reading. Word mapping is also a great opportunity to focus on consonant sounds and vowel sounds as they are mapping the sounds that they see in the word. Here is an example of what word mapping looks like. I have a whole blog post that explains it that is linked below if you want to take a look to have a more detailed explanation. But as you're using this strategy, make sure you have students identify which letters are representing vowel sounds and which letters are representing consonant sounds.
   4.Teach about syllables and syllable types. As I mentioned earlier, every syllable must have a vowel sound. If students know about syllables and syllable types, they will be able to spell more accurately and also break down words that they are reading when they come to a word that they don't already know. If you'd like to know more about teaching syllables and syllable types, make sure to join me next week because we are talking all about syllables and syllable types.

So let's sum it up. Here's what we have learned today: When we refer to vowels and consonants, we are talking about the sounds that letters represent. Vowels are made with an open mouth, no blockage, and we can sing that sound out. "Oh!" When we talk about consonant sounds, our mouth is blocked in some way by our lips, our teeth, or our tongue. English has 15 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds, and we can teach vowels and consonants by explicitly teaching whether a spelling pattern represents a vowel or a consonant sound, doing daily sound drills, mapping words, and teaching our students about syllable types. That's all I've got for you this week, but be sure to join me next week where we're going to take a dive into syllables, syllable types, how they work, why they're important, and how the heck to teach it. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and I will see you next week.