Old McWrite has some Vowels!

Vowels are TRICKY! Understanding them and how they work is one of the most important tasks of an emergent reader. As Joy has learned the letters over the past three years, I have always pointed out whether the letter is a vowel or a consonant. Not that I expected her to remember, but that she knew there were such things.

One day, as Joy and I were belting out songs in the car, I realized that "Old McDonald Has a Farm" and its "E-I-E-I-O" could easily be modified to be about the vowels. So I made up a new version, which goes like this:
                         Old McWrite had some vowels
                         A-E-I-O-U
                         And with these vowels he made some words
                         A-E-I-O-U
                         With a vowel-vowel here
                         And a vowel-vowel there
                         Here a vowel
                         There a vowel
                         Everywhere a vowel, vowel
                         Old McWrite had some vowels
                         A-E-I-O-U

Joy learned the song immediately and has been singing it for the past year and a half. Which has made teaching her to read much easier! As she's learned sounds, I can point out that the vowels make more than one sound. Most the consonants make only one, occasionally two. It's made teaching her some of the early rules of phonics easier: "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking, and says its own name."  Can't make much sense out of that without knowing what vowels are!

Today, Joy and I took a bunch of Scrabble tiles and spread them out on the table. Then I helped Joy pick out all the vowels. Once we had all the vowels out of the bunch, I chose a beginning and an ending consonant. I chose them based on which consonants would make lots of words with various vowels in the middle.

After setting up the consonants, I had Joy move one vowel of her choice to the middle of the word. Then she sounded out the word. This reinforced the short vowel sounds, but also left open the possibility of an irregular pattern. I believe it's important to let children see the words that don't fit the patterns, too, so they know that the patterns aren't written in stone.

So Joy built a whole bunch of words using the tiles. I think I set up three consonant patterns, including t_n, s_t, and b_nk, which made bank, benk, bink, bonk, and bunk. The nonsense words are just fine, although I point out that they're nonsense. If Joy didn't know what bunk means, I would tell her, just to build her vocabulary. (I wouldn't expect her to memorize the meaning or anything, but I would just describe what a bunk is and remind of her bunks she might have seen.)

A fun song and a quick activity to use with your emergent reader. Have fun today!!!