Understanding Long Vowels & How to Introduce Them: Phonics Rules for Teachers Ep 13

What is a long vowel and when should you teach long vowels to your students? Let's explore the definition of a long vowel, look at some examples, and discuss the order to teach long vowel sounds. I'll also share step by step how to introduce the concept of long vowels to your students.

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.

You can find the How the Heck to Teach 'Em supplementary resource to go along with this series here: https://www.myprimaryparadise.com/shop/phonics-rules-resources/

Transcript

Why is a long vowel called a long vowel? Why is it important to teach this to our students, and how do we actually do it?

Welcome to Episode 13 of Phonics Rules for Teachers and How the Heck to Teach Them. I'm Martha, and today we're going to be talking all about long vowels.

First, let’s define what a long vowel actually is. If you remember from my video on short vowels, we call short vowels "short" because our mouth only makes one movement when we make a short vowel sound. Long vowels, similarly, are called "long" because when we make a long vowel sound, our mouth makes two movements: it opens and it closes. The sounds of long A, E, and I end with a little bit of a "y" sound, and the long vowels O and U end with a little bit of a "w" sound. Long vowels could be classified as diphthongs because technically they glide through two sounds. For example: A, E, I, O, U.

The five long vowel sounds can be heard in these words: ape, eat, ice, no, use.

Before you teach long vowels, there are certain things that students should already understand and know:

1. They should understand that letters represent or spell sounds.
2. They should know the single letter sounds.
3. They should have a solid understanding of short vowel sounds.
4. They should be able to read words that contain single letter sounds and short vowel sounds.

I also like to teach the most common consonant digraphs before I teach long vowels, but that is just a matter of preference, and there’s nothing wrong with teaching long vowels before you teach consonant digraphs.

How can we spell long vowels? When we refer to long vowels, we are speaking about the sounds A, E, I, O, U. In English, we can spell each of these sounds a variety of ways:

• Long A can be spelled with eight different spelling patterns.
• Long E can also be spelled with eight different spelling patterns.
• Long I can be spelled with six different spelling patterns.
• Long O can be spelled with five different spelling patterns.
• Long U can be spelled with five different spelling patterns.

In all, that is 32 different ways to spell the long vowel sounds! If you’d like a complete list written out for you to use, you can find that in my How the Heck to Teach Them resource that is linked in this episode.

Now, before you feel really overwhelmed at the prospect of having to explain all of those long vowel spelling patterns, students cannot and should not learn all of those spelling patterns for the long vowels at once. Instead, we can teach them the different spelling patterns for long vowels in a structured, organized way, starting with the easiest and most common and moving towards the least common and more complex spelling patterns. So, rest assured, your kindergarteners do not need to know that both "eu" and "ue" can spell the long U sound!

While different curricula teach the long vowel spelling patterns in different orders, there’s no one perfect scope and sequence. Here is the order that I like to teach long vowel spelling patterns:

1. Open syllables.
2. Silent E syllables.
3. The most common vowel teams.
4. Y as a vowel.
5. The less common vowel team spelling patterns.

In some future episodes, I will be sharing exactly how I teach each of those spelling patterns, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss that.

Now, let's talk about how to introduce long vowel sounds to your students in your classroom. I'm going to share with you step-by-step exactly how I introduce the idea of long vowel sounds to my students.

1. Start by reviewing short vowels. Students need to have a solid understanding of short vowels before they should move on to long vowel spelling patterns. First, write the letters A, E, I, O, U on the board and ask students to say the sounds that each letter represents. At this point, if they’ve only learned short vowels, then they would be producing short vowel sounds: /ă/, /ĕ/, /ĭ/, /ŏ/, /ŭ/. Then, say some words with short vowels (for example, cat, egg, or pin) and have students identify which short vowel sound they are hearing. For example, for cat, they would say that they are hearing /ă/, and then you can identify that that /ă/ is spelled with the letter A.
2. Review what makes a vowel sound a vowel sound. Explain that vowel sounds are formed when our mouth is unblocked when we're making the sound, unlike consonant sounds where our mouth is blocked in some way.
3. Review that letters represent or spell sounds. Remind them that some letters can represent more than one sound.
4. Let your students listen to some long vowel sounds. Now, tell your students they are going to learn some new vowel sounds. Again, remind them that vowel sounds are produced with an open mouth. You can illustrate this by having them say the /b/ sound and then having them say the /ē/ sound and ask them to point out which one was the vowel sound.
5. Give them the opportunity to produce some long vowel sounds. This doesn’t need to be done in writing at all. This is just an oral activity. Tell your students you are going to say some words very slowly. Ask them to repeat the words and then have them see if they can identify the vowel sound in each word. Remember, we’re only practicing listening and producing these sounds; you don’t need to write any of these words down at this point. We just want them to be able to hear the vowel sound. Later on, we will start introducing specific spelling patterns, but for now, we just want them to be able to hear and produce those long vowel sounds. For example, say the word ay and have your students repeat it. Ask them what two sounds they hear in the word ay. Have them identify which of those sounds is a vowel sound: /ā/. You can repeat this with words for every single long vowel sound. For example, you could use eat, hi, no, and use.
6. Review the sounds from each word. After you’ve gone through each word, you can have your students produce each sound again, and of course, you can help them and guide them through this: /ā/, /ē/, /ī/, /ō/, /ū/. You can explain that these vowel sounds are called long vowel sounds because their mouth makes two movements—they are opened and then they are closed. Your students might even realize that these vowel sounds are the names of letters, and this can be a great thing to point out to them: that long vowel sounds spell the name of the letter.

Now your students have a great foundation for understanding long vowel sounds. All of this work begins orally, but then we can quickly move into teaching long vowel sounds in connection with specific spelling patterns. I like to begin orally so students remember that long vowels are the sounds and they’re not connected to just one single spelling pattern.

From there, I would begin by teaching open syllables to my students in connection with long vowels, but that is for next week, so be sure to join me again next week when we talk about how we can teach open syllables in connection to long vowels to our students.

Don’t forget to like and subscribe so you never miss an episode, and if you have any questions and comments, feel free to drop them below, and I will respond directly to you. Thank you so much for joining this week's episode of Phonics Rules for Teachers and How the Heck to Teach Them.