What do you do when your students don’t know the sounds
vowels make? What if they don’t know the
difference between consonants and vowels?
What if they tell you they did add a vowel to the words – t and c?
Okay, not a huge deal, right? What if they are in third grade? Um yikes!!
That is what I’m running into with the girl I tutor. She has always struggled with spelling and
phonics. She is a pretty decent reader
but when she gets to an unknown word she often just guesses with no real
strategies in place to decode it. But at
the end of last school year, I realized she didn’t know about vowels. I guess I really didn’t care that she mixed
up the terminology ‘vowel’ and ‘consonants.’
My bigger concern was that she couldn’t tell me the sounds each vowel
made. No wonder she couldn’t spell. If she didn’t have the word memorized, she
had no tools to help her stretch out the word and write the sounds she heard.
We spent the summer going vowel by vowel. Each week, we focused on a different letter. We would do a long and short letter sort with
words I gave her. I had a hard time
finding words that were appropriate for her.
Most vowel activities are designed for younger learners so the words are
often three or four letters. We would
sort whatever words were in the activity that I brought that week and then we
would grab a magazine or book and go through it searching for words that fit
the long and short sound of that week’s letter.
She seemed to be getting it a little more and then school started. ..
She continues to have struggles with spelling and
phonics. I thought there was improvement
until last week when she told me t and c were vowels. AHHHH!
I used Making Sense of Phonics by
Isabel Beck in my second grade classroom to teach phonics and had really good results. The students liked that they had letter cards
that they could manipulate on their desks.
I would tell them what letters to put out and they would read the word. Then we would switch the letters and they
would read the new word. This worked
wonders with showing the difference between CvC words and CvCe words. That darn bossy e (aka magic e, silent
e.) I did some of the lessons with her
last year but I’m thinking of making it the first thing we do each week during
tutoring. Since school started, we’ve
been focusing on getting her homework finished and practicing her spelling
words so that she isn’t so overwhelmed when she gets home but I feel like I’m
providing a disservice by not working on this problem each week.
Do you have any advice for me? What’s worked for your students? What have you done with students who seem to
have missed the whole concept of the sounds letters make when put together in
different ways? Hit me with your best
advice and resources because we need help!!!