consonants

Short and Long Vowels – What Are They?

Jj is for Jottings 85.  Short and Long Vowels.

Since we were on the subject of vowels (see Auditory Discrimination of Vowel Sounds and Vowel Discrimination Activities), it occurred to me that you may have heard of short and long vowels and not know what they are.  You would think that a long vowel is a longer version of a short vowel, but they are completely different sounds.  Quite simply, short vowels are the sounds made by /a,e,i,o,u/, and long vowels are the names of those five letters.

Picture of a lilac Burmese cat stretched out asleep with the caption: Short and long vowels? Who cares? I'd rather have a zzzzz.

Short and long vowels? Who cares? I’d rather have a zzzzz.

 

WHAT DO SHORT AND LONG VOWELS LOOK LIKE?

Short Vowels.

The easiest short vowel words are 3-letter CVC words eg. bag, beg, big, bog, bug.  In each case we pronounce the vowel as its basic sound.  When syllables end in a vowel and then a consonant (as in the examples above), the vowel is usually short. If there is more than one consonant, the vowel is almost always short, eg. “back, stopped”.

Long Vowels.         

There are several ways of making long vowels.

  1. Putting two vowels next to each other. As a result, the word usually makes the sound of the first vowel’s name (“When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”).  Examples are “bead”, “mail”, “boat”.
  2. Another way of creating a long vowel sound is by putting an ‘e’ on the end of the word. This is often referred to as the “bossy ‘e’” or the “magic ‘e’”.  (“The ‘e’ on the end makes the vowel say its name.  The ‘e’ is silent.”) Examples are “bake”, “seed”, “hike”, “poke”, “mute”.  See how you can use a bossy ‘e’ to change a short vowel to a long vowel with these minimal pairs: can/cane; bet/beet; rid/ride; hop/hope; cut/cute.  If you say each of these aloud, it is very clear that the first half of the pair uses the sound made by the vowel, and the second half uses the vowel’s name.
  3. A vowel at the end of a syllable is almost always long.  Some examples of this are “I, we, he, she, go, try, potato and tomato”.
  4. -Igh and -ight are usually long I (and silent GH), so we have “bright, fight, high, light, might, night, right, sigh, sight, tight”.

Remember that this is English, and there are almost invariably exceptions.

VOWELS OTHER THAN SHORT AND LONG VOWELS.

Short and long vowels aren’t the only vowel sounds, and the other vowels will be discussed next time.

 

Check out the Facebook page: Aa is for Alpacas.

 

Vowel Discrimination Activities.

Jj is for Jottings 84.  Vowel Discrimination Activities.

Vowel Discrimination Activity 3. Identifying /i/ and /e/, plus a picture of the Ii is for Itchy page of "Aa is for Alpacas".

Vowel Discrimination Activity 3. Identifying /i/ and /e/.

 

As promised in the previous article, here are some vowel discrimination activities to help your child to hear the difference between vowel sounds, in particular the tricky pairs of a/u and i/e.  At the same time these activities reinforce the sound-letter links for the vowels.  After all, it’s not much use for reading and spelling if you can hear the difference between them but don’t know which letter belongs to the sound. Continue reading →

Analysing Consonant Sounds: 5 Activities.

Jj is for Jottings 82.  Analysing Consonant Sounds: 5 Activities.

 

In the previous post on analysing sounds, I said I’d give some activities for analysing sounds – in this case consonant sounds at the beginnings and ends of words.  You can use the activities for sounds at the beginning of words, and then repeat for the end consonants.  Remember that, in these early stages, the words need to be very simple – CV (consonant-vowel) eg. “toe”or CVC, eg. “bit”.  When choosing words, remember that one letter doesn’t always equal one sound.  Click on that phrase if you need further information on that – it’s very important.  I have divided the 5 activities for analysing consonant sounds into two areas – Listening and Producing. Continue reading →

Analysing Sounds.

Jj is for Jottings 81.  Analysing Sounds.

Photo of a child analysing sounds in the alphabet book "Aa is for Alpacas" with his grandmother.

Henry is learning sounds the fun way with “Aa is for Alpacas” and the help of his grandmother, Ann.

 

Analysing sounds in reading is really the opposite of blending sounds (see here and  here for discussion and exercises in sound blending.)  Analysing sounds is simply breaking words into their component sounds (whereas blending sounds is joining the sounds up to make words).  The progression is: listening for and isolating sounds at the beginning of a word, then at the end, and finally the vowel in the middle (assuming it is a consonant-vowel-consonant [CVC] word).  It is even better to begin with 2-sound CV words, to make it as easy as possible in the early stages.

The Usual Problem Rears Its Ugly Head – Using Letter Names Instead of Sounds.

If I had a dollar for every time I have said: “What sound can you hear at the start/end of – ?” and the child says the letter name, then I’d be really quite wealthy.  What you need to do then is to use the letter name instead of the sound in the given word to prove that it doesn’t work.  Eg. When a child says that the first sound in “dog” is dee, the response should be along the lines of, “That would be “deeog”.  You said the name of the letter, not the sound that you can hear.  /d-o-g/ makes ‘dog’”.   You also need to encourage them to feel the sound in their mouth.

Children Really Need to Know Letter Names and Sounds When Analysing Sounds.

Of course, if children know the name and sound of each letter of the alphabet, they are far more likely to correctly give you the sound rather than the letter name when analysing or blending words.  This is where  Aa is for Alpacas comes in as the means of teaching this with least effort.  The final goal is to have the alphabet clearly written/printed out in front of the child: Point randomly to letters and say “name” or “sound” and, when the child responds correctly 100% of the time, they really know their sounds and letter names.

Tune in next time for activities to assist children to analyse sounds in words.

Check out the Facebook page: Aa is for Alpacas

 

 

Blending Sounds: A Simple Game For Everyday Life.

Jj is for Jottings 77.  Blending Sounds: A Simple Game For Everyday Life.

What is Blending?

Blending is “pushing” individual sounds or syllables together to make a word.  In early stages of reading the child will be blending sounds, but as they progress and begin to recognise chunks of words, they will also be blending syllables. Continue reading →

Single Words Versus Connected Speech.

Jj is for Jottings 72.  Single Words Versus Connected Speech.

Following on from the discussion about the end of a word not always really being the end (here), we find that, as a result of running our words together to get a smooth flow which is easier for the listener to follow, we can end up with strings of consonants together, as in, “He mends trucks.”  Continue reading →

The End of a Word is Not Always the End.

Jj is for Jottings 70.  The End of a Word is Not Always the End.

In traditional tests of articulation (speech sounds) and when we are sounding out words in reading, we think very much in terms of sounds at the beginning, in the middle and on the end of a word.  In the case of early stage reading and spelling using 3-sound words, we are asking, “What sound can you hear at the beginning of the word?”  “What sound can you hear at the end of the word?   “What sound can you hear in the middle of the word?”  Continue reading →

/l/ Sound is Different on the End.

Jj is for Jottings 69.  /l/ Sound is Different on the End.

You probably haven’t thought about this before, but /l/ (the slashes indicate the sound rather than the letter name) is pronounced differently when it is the last sound in an utterance or followed by a consonant, compared with when it is followed by a vowel.  And if that sounds like gobbledygook, Continue reading →