S1 Ep6 All About Short Vowels
Shannon and Mary discuss the background and strategies for teaching short vowels. You will learn facts and tidbits about literacy and why short vowels make their short, unique sounds. Hint! It has to do with the consonant next door. Learn about multisensory phonics-based games and strategies for teaching struggling readers in your classroom. In the show notes, you will find links to the resources we enjoy and use with our students.
Transcript:
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1.6 All About Short Vowels
Mary Saghafi: [00:00:00] Hey Shannon, do your students know why short vowels are short? Okay. This is the Reading Teacher's Lounge where listeners can eavesdrop on professional conversations between elementary reading. Teachers we're passionate about literacy and strive to find strategies to reach all learners. Shannon and Mary are neighbors who realized that they were literacy soul sisters at a dinner in their Atlanta neighborhood.
Once they started chatting about reading, they haven't really stopped. Come join the conversation.
Shannon Betts: Hey, I am Shannon Betts. I've been teaching for over 16 years. My specialty is locating the missing pieces in students reading, development, and choosing just right activities to fill those gaps. You can find me online@readingdevelopment.com and at rdg Development on Twitter and Instagram.
Mary Saghafi: Hey, I'm Mary Saghafi.
I'm a reading tutor. I have taught all elementary grades. I have Orton-Gillingham [00:01:00] training and have been helping students with reading issues and dyslexia for 10 years. I love talking all things teaching, and I believe that humor goes a long way when asking students and teachers to do hard things. I'm excited to share with Shannon and learn along with all of you.
Shannon Betts: All right, so this episode is all about short vowels. Everything about short vowels. We'll see how long we're able to talk about short vowels. We're trying to plan a short episode, but it might end up being long just because this is something we've taught many years and we have a lot to say about it.
Mary Saghafi: Not only that, it's also quite common.
So I bet you didn't know this, Shannon, but did you know that short vowels. In words make up 50, maybe in some circles, 60% of the written running language that we use in English.
Shannon Betts: I did not know that.
Mary Saghafi: Yep. That's why it's so important to really get a solid foundation in teaching these short vowels. When we talk about syllables.
Syllables can be called closed [00:02:00] syllables if they have one short vowel in them. So we might interchange short vowels, enclosed syllables, but you should just know that a closed syllable means it contains one short vowel.
Shannon Betts: Mm-hmm. And let's start off with just saying, what is a vowel? Because when I first started teaching, I didn't know it and I ended up finding the definition.
On Dr. Google at some point I found a linguistics textbook online when I was researching vowels one day to prep for teaching. And what I learned from that book and what I internalized and sort of said it in kid friendly language was that vowel sounds open your mouth when you are saying vowel sounds.
It's a little bit like an opera singer because you can just hold your mouth open the whole time you're saying those sounds. So like the short vowel. Ah. Or if it's the long vowel, a nothing is closing your mouth because you're opening your mouth to produce those sounds. But then consonant, consonants actually close your mouth and you're producing them, so like [00:03:00] Mm, or, or, and so that's going to come into play when we start talking about closed syllables and open syllables because the consonants are actually closing in.
The vowels
Mary Saghafi: Absolutely correct. I'm gonna kind of piggyback and say that the vowel sounds are the unobstructed way of producing a sound in your mouth, which is exactly right. So that just means that your teeth, your throat, your tongue, they don't impede that sound. So you can carry out that sound for as long as you hold your breath.
The other really important part is when you're teaching consonants, there are. Plenty of teachers who don't intentionally teach consonants incorrectly, but lots of times they have learned incorrectly to say B instead of B. Right? We're adding, sometimes
Shannon Betts: people
Mary Saghafi: add
Shannon Betts: the sound and, but we don't say.
Baal,
Mary Saghafi: we say Baal ball, right? And so it is [00:04:00] really, really important, especially if you have a struggling reader. Especially someone who has weak phonological awareness skills that they really need you to pronounce the. And sounds absolutely correctly when you're teaching them. So, when you're teaching your phonic sounds, they, there are two ways to pronounce the TH sound.
There's a voice. If you put your fingers on your throat, you can feel the vibration of like the word. Then there's an unvoiced th that is like the word thin, and that's where the breath comes out of your mouth. When I am teaching my students, they tend to already have lots of difficulties with this, so I make it very multisensory.
So we are constantly touching our throat. We're trying to figure out what position our tongue is in. We're trying to look in a mirror and kind of see. What shape does your mouth make when you make the O sound? What [00:05:00] the A or O, what shape does your mouth make when you have an ah, and they're very large with your mouth and they even kind of mimic the shape?
And so we, we do a lot of time spent in front of a mirror, especially early on.
Shannon Betts: Yes, I start with a mirror. So when I'm first starting, this is my first reading lesson. I do at the start of every single year, whether I'm teaching a homeroom class or a guided reading group, we start off with what are vowels?
Were consonants, and so I have all the letters on index cards, and I pull out mirrors. I also sketch out a little emoji face that has an open mouth and a little emoji face that has a closed mouth. And I ask the students to categorize the letters by which ones open your mouth when you say the sounds and which ones close your mouth.
And they end up coming up with the vowels all in a stack. And that's when we name them. Those are the vowels. 'cause the vowels open your mouth. And then when I start talking about the closed syllable, the short vowels, [00:06:00] which is where I go right after that lesson. I talk about how in the word me. The E is open.
Mm-hmm. And so it says its name 'cause it's open and free. Look at me, I'm free. And I could just keep saying the E sound over and over 'cause there's no consonant closing it in. But as soon as I put the T, there it goes. At. And when I say the T sound, all of a sudden my mouth closes. So that vowel is closed in.
It's not free and it's not allowed to say its name. It has to say its short sound.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, that's exactly how I teach it too. I imagine a house and we put, we have a, an actual little house that we use and it has a door and we put the vowel and we put a consonant in front, and then the vowel is in the middle.
And if your word is. HI, we say hi, and the door is open and we put the consonant on the back of the door and it might be the consonant letter T. And so [00:07:00] we close that door and it says Ha, and it just barely gets out. Its is sound before the door closes right on it. And the T makes its hard sound. So your word is it?
Hit and
Shannon Betts: we, I love that process 'cause you're making it kinesthetic for the hands-on learners that really need a tactile thing and so they're opening and closing the door. I love that.
Mary Saghafi: Right. Well, we know that the best way to teach children is using a multisensory phonics based approach. Yes. And so for all of my lessons and lessons that are directed by Orton-Gillingham methodology and lots of other different types of reading instruction, but.
Once again, I'll say it's the gold standard. It, it includes a visual, it includes an auditory component and a tactile and a kinesthetic piece. So all of those components are really key in ensuring that the brain is firing all pistons and we are really engaging all of the parts to make sure that children are [00:08:00] fully engaged.
Shannon Betts: So let's talk about the visuals. Mm-hmm. I use five. Pictures pretty much for the short vowel words all the time, just because I even need to use them just to produce the s sound on command. I have to think about the word egg. So over the years I have made little sentence strips and little picture cards and anchor charts and things that have the picture sounds so that students can have help producing those short vowel sounds.
So I use a for apple.
Mary Saghafi: Mm-hmm.
Shannon Betts: Eh egg. Eh, igloo, ah, octopus umbrella. Sometimes I do,
Up
Mary Saghafi: good. I it with the methodology that I'm familiar with. We also call them phonogram cards. And the gram cards can either have picture support or not have picture support. And early on we ensure that the picture support is there because we wanna make sure that when we're doing the drill component, which is another.
Piece in the Ordin [00:09:00] methodology is that you're making sure that the student can simultaneously, orally spell out all of the sounds. So if you're, if you're saying that your word is mop, they're going to tap it out either on their arm, tap it out with their fingers, and the involves the visual piece of using a phonogram card.
Maybe to spell it or they're writing it on the table. The, I'm sorry, I just got caught up in my own thoughts. The visual piece, the audio, auditory, the kinesthetic, and the tactile. So all of these things go together. I'm gonna piggyback and jump back to what we were originally talking about, which are the phonogram cards that have the visual support.
I also use the exact same picture cues that you do for Apple A e Egg. And what I find with my students here in Georgia is that we really have a difficult time, eh, eh, egg, if. I igloo and really making a big [00:10:00] difference, and so I actually put my hand in front of my mouth and I stretch out the E sound.
I use a vertical finger and do, if, if, if
Shannon Betts: I did the same thing, I hold a sharpie marker in front of my mouth. And the E has a little horizontal line, and so I show them that E has a horizontal line and our mouth is trying to stretch to make an eh, eh, horizontal line, stretching out your smile, and that it is a vertical line with the letter I and I hold the marker up in front of my mouth and show that stretch there.
Mary Saghafi: There's a lot of practice that has to be involved in making sure that our students are learning about their short vowels, and so we need to make sure that they are practicing, practicing, practicing short vowels.
Shannon Betts: And what students, if you can get students to really to build that relationship with students and have them communicate with you.
Students will tell me often those sounds, those sound the same to me. I don't hear the difference. Aren't those the same sound? And you can even see it [00:11:00] in their spelling. Even if they don't communicate that to you out loud, you can look in their spelling if they are struggling. With vowels and their vowels are consistently wrong, then you're gonna need to go all the way back to short vowels and just make sure that they can hear the differences in all of those vowel sounds.
Yeah. And we'll talk about that when we talk about activities, but
Mary Saghafi: yeah, absolutely. And I think what, what we're sort of building upon right now too is that a short vowel is always going to have the vowel consonant pattern. It's, it can have up to two letters. One vowel, one consonant, like the word at.
And then it can build upon itself. It could be as long as seven letters long and only contain that one short vowel sound, and it still makes a closed syllable. So you know, so if you're gonna do a progression, it might be the CVC word is. And that also is another teacher jargon piece that parents are often [00:12:00] confused about.
Consonant is c vowel is vowel. And a lot of teachers, especially in the early grades, will often shorten it and talk to parents about that. So don't, don't shy away. If you understand the difference between a consonant and vowel, you can understand this concept fairly easily. So the first CVC pattern, CAT cat it can contain two letters, VC IT, it.
And then it can also contain digraphs or blends. So an example of a die graph would be SHA die graph means that there are two letters that make one sure sound.
Shannon Betts: We'll have a whole episode about those later.
Mary Saghafi: Absolutely. You could also have A-C-C-V-C-C like the word stick, S-T-I-C-K. So moving into short vowels for me, I like to do this because it builds on spelling rules, which is another longer episode.
Mm-hmm. I'm sure we can do, but there are plenty of spelling rules and [00:13:00] spelling generalizations that follow the short rule, that short vowel pattern. And one example could be the floss rule. So it a word that contains one short. Vowel followed by the letters FL, s, or Z. You're gonna double the last letter.
So an example would be the word floss, F-L-O-S-S. Why do we double the S? The O in the word floss is short and it contains the letter S following it, so you're going to double it. F-L-O-S-S. Another example could be the word stiff. S-T-I-F-F, mass. MASS buzz, BUZZ or the word off OFF, all contain one short vowel followed by FLS or Z, and then you just double the last letter.
Another example would be the CK spelling generalization, the C-H-T-C-H [00:14:00] spelling generalization, DGE rule, BUN one, one doubling rule. All of these are really specific in teaching explicit. Phonetic instruction. So they all build upon each other.
Shannon Betts: And you don't teach those all at once. You teach those one at a time, sort of as you're going through the short vowel unit with your students?
Mary Saghafi: Absolutely. It takes me about a week at a time sometimes even more to teach a spelling generalization. When I'm teaching just the short vowel sounds and rules, I always allow myself at least six weeks. To actually do that, and my tutoring sessions are about 45 minutes, two times a week minimum for students who have a diagnosis of dyslexia.
Shannon Betts: Okay? When I introduce short vowels either in my whole group phonics program or in my small groups, first, I just make sure that the students hear the differences. In the short vowels, [00:15:00] so I don't even pull out letter cards at the beginning other than that initial sorting between a vowel and a consonant.
Mary Saghafi: Yep.
Shannon Betts: I will start with just pictures and words. Their way in the back of the book, they have. Picture cards with the initial short vowels. So we'll sort by initial short vowels, so they have, you know, astronaut or octopus or umbrella and where you hear the vowel sound at the front of the word and it's a little bit easier for the students to produce the sound and hear the difference and be able to sort them when it's at the front.
And then we move to pictures where it's a medial short vowel and it's in the middle of the words. And so I have these little like houses. And I give each student in the reading group a house and I'll say, you have the A house or you have the house or the, ah. And then I'll say, I'll show 'em a picture and I'll say, does this belong in your house?
If it doesn't, then whose house does it belong to? Nice. And the students love playing that game. I've probably, doesn't it? I don't know, 50 times over the years.
Mary Saghafi: Oh, I love that. That's really cute.
Shannon Betts: What
Mary Saghafi: a great way for [00:16:00] them to
Shannon Betts: really work together too. To figure out. Yes. And they're hearing each other's errors and that's when those conversations happen, where the students will say oh, that one sounds the same to me.
And we'll talk in a second about troubleshooting, but I've actually made some little anchor charts that I'll have displayed or I'll sketch out really fast to sort of really show the students the difference in how your mouth produces a sound and things like that, like you talked about.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah.
Shannon Betts: So then after we.
A after the students can really hear the difference with just, with just pictures, then we start matching the letters to it. And we'll start with Word families and we'll spell the word families and just change that first sound and use letter towels to build the picture that we have already. You know, used in our sort.
And that's takes, that takes a few weeks in the reading group where we're doing each of those activities for probably 20 or 30 minutes each time we meet.
Mary Saghafi: Yep.
Shannon Betts: And after that, you know, then I start watching their [00:17:00] spelling and I see can they spell them? Can they do the nonsense words, reading those decoding.
Mary Saghafi: I'm so glad, I'm so glad you brought that up, because I think that the nonsense words in this case are the like. Easiest, fastest way to figure out whether or not your students are, you know
Shannon Betts: it if it's mastered or not. Mm-hmm. If they can read Z.
Mary Saghafi: Exactly. Then they know COG. Exactly. And
Shannon Betts: c OJ.
Mary Saghafi: ZOJ. And the reason I say that is so funny because for me I'm so rule-based oriented that I know that j is never at the end of an English word.
And so I it, that is such a funny thing for me. The other, I bet you didn't know this either. Maybe you did, you're pretty bright about these kind of things, but exceptions always throw me off. I'm, I'm definitely a rule-based kind of gal and, the reason that we spell have and Give is that there is no English word that has a V at the end of the English or the end of their word.
So in the Word [00:18:00] have, it produces a short vowel sound. But we put the E on the end because V never goes at the end of an English word.
Shannon Betts: Okay. And I read in a language textbook that in like middle English, it used to behave.
Mary Saghafi: Yes it
Shannon Betts: did. And so that's, it follows the final E rule.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, no, that's absolutely true.
So people in Orton-Gillingham have a tendency to argue about the etymology of words. Yeah. How do their word origins are. And so that's true. I was reading and decoding a word with a kid recently that was, the word was unresponsive. And so he spelled the entire thing out. You know, we were doing prefixes and suffixes and, and when he got to the suffix, he wrote SIV, and I went.
Nope. Yeah, you're so close. But there are these little tricky rules that you have to kind of still explicitly teach. So
Shannon Betts: Patricia Cunningham talks about teaching the brain to, like, looks right as a strategy
Mary Saghafi: mm-hmm. Of starting to sort of see, look at it in print or look at it with a few different versions.
Mm-hmm. [00:19:00] And your eyes will
Shannon Betts: sort of. Recognize which one looks right. 'cause it might have seen it in print before.
Mary Saghafi: But I will, I can argue two ways on that for me, yes, I am a person who has to write it out and see for myself whether it looks right. But if you are a person with dyslexia, that tends to be a really tricky thing for you to be able to, so that's part of the disconnect
Shannon Betts: in the brain.
Okay.
Mary Saghafi: It's a disconnect. So that's why people recommend teaching such rule-based. Analogies with words and, and grouping them into families and, and being really explicit about that instruction. So yes. And perhaps no. So, which is an okay teaching with
Shannon Betts: students that have learning disabilities or not.
Mary Saghafi: Mm-hmm.
Shannon Betts: So we're gonna link in the show notes to a number of free activities that have the sound pictures and things. And have the words.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah. One of the resources I love, and I know you do too,
Shannon Betts: is the FCRR. Florida Center for Reading Research, they have done so much of the work for us.
Mary Saghafi: Oh my goodness.
Shannon Betts: And so they [00:20:00] have a ton of free reading centers that can just be downloaded on their site. And sometimes it's a little hard finding the right activities for what school you're teaching. So we're gonna link to some of our favorites.
Mary Saghafi: Yep. Happy to do that.
Shannon Betts: So let's talk about troubleshooting a little bit, because I've worked with a lot of English language learners over the years and.
Short vowels is one of the hardest things for them, is what I've learned. So my first school I taught at for 12 years. I worked with Spanish speakers and their main difficulty was with that short E and that short I
Mary Saghafi: mm-hmm.
Shannon Betts: Like you were talking about. And so that's when I did the sharpie on the sideways and vertically and things like that.
And then I transferred to my new school five years ago, and there were students from other. That spoke other languages, not Spanish. And they didn't have trouble with the short E and the short eye. They had a lot of trouble with the short A and the short O and the short U. And so I sort of had to develop different techniques for that.
And so what I came up with, which you kind of touched on a second ago with the [00:21:00] mirrors, but I called them big mouth and small mouth sounds. And so if you look at. The A and the O, they look like circles. Mm-hmm. When you look at the actual letters and your mouth is forming as big of a circle as it possibly can, when you were saying those sounds ah, you're like stretching your mouth to like eat an apple and Yeah.
Ah, open your mouth and say, ah, the doctor's office.
Mary Saghafi: Yes.
Shannon Betts: And so when the students will tell me the A and the A sound the same, we pull out picture cards. I always pull out my picture cards and. We, I will produce those sounds for them, and I will say, look at my mouth. Which 1:00 AM I making? Am I making a big mouth sound or am I making which is a short, you know mm-hmm.
Kind of a little opening mouth sound. And so they will watch me produce the sound or they'll watch me. And I'll have the letters out and I'll say, point to which one I'm saying,
Mary Saghafi: great.
Shannon Betts: And then I'll pull out pictures that have it in the middle of the word, and [00:22:00] I'll say, does Cat have the big mouth sound or the little mouth sound?
And so forth. When they, and then I'll ask them to produce it after they kind of analyze my production of those sounds. Then I'll ask them and I'll say, okay, say the sound in this picture. Okay. Which vowel would you use for this picture?
Mary Saghafi: Fantastic. That's definitely the best way to work with any struggling student is to make sure that one, you start with picture support and to give them as much tactile things to manipulate and to move around.
Because not only does it, it gives that pause where you're able to make a mistake without having to go back and erase it. And all of the pencil paper tasks that we ask students to do, and if they get it wrong and the act of just erasing their wrong answer is, is a bigger blow than we even imagine.
Shannon Betts: Yeah.
Mary Saghafi: I, I think, and so I think that, especially for young learners, but for any learners really making sure that you're giving them lots of. Chances to [00:23:00] try and not call themselves out and actually fail at the test loudly or fail at the task loudly. I think that's really important. I can't emphasize enough the importance of picture support and how worried I am that sometimes teachers are getting away from the picture support and because of time crunches in the classroom, they'll move to just get the work sample.
Really, we have to go back and make sure that we're doing good quality teaching. You don't want a poor work sample if you haven't already built the foundation. So
Shannon Betts: yes, I've worked with students in fourth and fifth grade who were just. Not yet readers, I mean, could not read the most basic sentences. And when I pulled out the picture cards that look like they're from, they look like kindergarten activities 'cause they are from my kindergarten box of activities.
And the teachers look at me a little crazy and say, why are you doing picture games with my student? Why are you taking apart sounds on your arm with my student? And I'll say, do you want 'em to learn to read or not? Right. This will teach [00:24:00] 'em how to read 'cause otherwise they're never gonna connect the sounds to the letters 'cause.
All of that is working to build the phonological awareness to eventually have sensible correspondence at developmental stage.
Mary Saghafi: I am so happy with the instruction that you're able to provide your students. I have another cool scientific tidbit that I just heard this week, and that is that all brains we know have, you know, neuroplasticity and they're able to change and grow.
And so for a long time people thought that you know, if you had dyslexia, your brain was always going to be dyslexic, which is true, but, no matter who you are, if you are a struggling reader, if you have a label of dyslexia or, or whatever it is, you have plasticity in your brain even if you are 90 years old.
And you can be taught using high quality instruction for 100 hours. And there are functional MRIs now that show how brains have changed to become more efficient readers. With [00:25:00] effective instruction. And for children it's about a hundred hours. With adults, they say that it may be a little bit more, but all people's brains can change with effective instruction.
Shannon Betts: That's hopeful because when I first started teaching, there was sort of an old WIS tale that said you can't learn to read after third grade.
Mary Saghafi: Correct. And that's not necessarily true. It is difficult and it is more difficult the older you are because it's harder for you to manipulate sounds that you have miscued in your brain for such a long
Shannon Betts: time.
Mm-hmm. You have to rewire all that. Right. And you really, that's why with those older students, I go back to the pictures and I go back to just playing with the sounds orally because they need to train their ears before they can train their eyes and the other reading skills.
Mary Saghafi: That that is absolutely 100% correct.
So, yes, that is true. And teachers go back to the big six.
Shannon Betts: So we've talked for 26 minutes about short vowels, so I think we need to [00:26:00] come to a close. There's a lot in the show notes if you want more information about this. So, to sum up, we're gonna say there's a reason why the short vowels are short.
Students can and should be taught the when and why of closed syllables as the part of your reading and phonics program, no matter what level or age, the students I've taught all the way from first grade on, I have taught them the closed syllable rule because I want them to see that there's a reason why it says a short vowel.
It's not just because I told you the first set of words we learn. You're gonna say these sounds I feel like they can handle. I've seen that they can handle the framework of understanding why the sounds do a certain thing.
Mary Saghafi: I definitely agree. So keep up the good work.
Shannon Betts: Yes. And also in the show notes we're gonna link to, there's some really good YouTube clips that I've used with my students.
There's some by Nessie, which is from England, and they are really good about producing the sounds which is perfectly like the queen and alpha blocks and some other [00:27:00] things. So look for those resources.
Mary Saghafi: Thank you for listening to the Reading Teachers Lounge podcast. We would like to thank Jordan Kempker for providing the original music.
If you could please write us a review on iTunes that will help more teachers find us. Also, if you find our information valuable, please tell fellow, teacher or a parent to come check us, us out at our webpage, www.readingteacherslounge.com.
