Now, if you have been working with us for a while, you’ll know that we LOVE teaching with key images and phrases to help anchor skills for a student. For au/aw, we use the phrase “Yawn, I have to do the laundry.” This helps our struggling readers and spellers remember the rule. Keep reading for more tips, tricks and activities surrounding the au/aw vowel team.

We use the key phrase “Snow Plow” to teach this phonogram because “ow” has two sounds - /O/ like in snow, and /ow/ like in plow. Read on for teaching tips, tricks and activities!

OU has two sounds. To help our students remember these sounds, we use the key phrase “Trout Soup” because it can say /ow/ like in trout and /oo/ like in soup. The visual of fish soup is one the students don’t forget very easily! Keep reading for more tips, tricks and vowel team activities!

OO can be a tricky vowel team because it has two sounds. Click through to read about our tips & tricks for teaching this vowel team!

We use both “oi” and “oy” to make the /oi/ sound (think of the words “boy” and “foil”). When that sound comes in the middle of a word, we use “oi.” If it comes at the end of the word, we will use “oy.” Keep reading to learn more about how we teach our students all about this vowel team!

Vowel teams can be tricky for students, but we have found that teaching them in this way has made a massive difference. Keep reading for ideas for teaching the OA/OE vowel teams!

With so many ways to get long E sound, we wanted to show you how we teach the ‘ee’ and ‘ey’ vowel teams. Open to read about our approach and grab our ee/ey center activities.

Both “ai” and “ay” say the long A sound. We use “ai” in the middle of the word (think rain, pail, train, mail) and “ay” at the end of the word (play, stay, day, May).

Thanks for sticking with us and our series of The Reading & Spelling Rules Nobody Ever Taught You. The fifth syllable type teach our students is Vowel Teams.  This is when two vowels stick together to make one sound.  Think of the vowel sounds in words like rain, play, green, key, goat, boil, etc. Vowel teams can be kind of tricky so click through to read more and grab our Anchor Chart Worksheets!

Discover the science behind teaching the six syllable types for effective literacy instruction! Dive into our blog and demystify the process of teaching each type, from closed to stable final syllables. Learn strategies, explore resources, and elevate your reading instruction now!