Understanding the Six Syllable Types - Vowel Teams

Vowel Teams (more formally called vowel digraphs and vowel diphthongs) are a critical element to your literacy instruction. Keep reading to learn more about this syllable type and how we teach it to our reading intervention students.

One of the most effective practices used in evidence-based reading instruction is the process of teaching each of the syllable types and syllable division patterns.

If you have never heard of the six syllable types, don't worry - you are not alone. Check out our blog: What’s This About the Six Syllable Types.

Okay, okay, another quick review!

Why teach the six syllable types?

Understanding the syllable types helps students anticipate the vowel sounds within a word. It also helps students learn to break or chunk words effectively to sound out longer words.

The Science of Reading has provided a great deal of information on the most effective, evidence-based practices in teaching reading. Teaching the six syllable types aligns with the explicit teaching of concepts. So specifically, we teach:

What is a Syllable?

A syllable is a word or part of a word with one vowel sound. Understanding this definition can help us to read and spell effectively.

As we work with students we also want to follow a systematic progression of concepts. Systematic phonics-based instruction is well-researched and has been proven to help children learn to read better than all forms of control group instruction including whole language based on quantitative meta-analyses (Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Stahl, S. A., & Willows, D. M. 2001).

A systematic progression means working from the most basic concepts and progressing to more complex concepts while continuing to systematically review the concepts taught earlier in the progression. Now, it’s important to note that our systematic progression of concepts is not necessarily the same as others - this is okay. It’s all about using a hierarchy and order of teaching that generally provides students with access to the tools they need as quickly as possible to be able to read as many words as possible.

We continue our syllable type instruction with vowel team syllables. We usually save this pattern for later in the progression because this is where things get really confusing for our students! You can find more information on the other syllable types here:

Closed Syllables

What are Vowel Team Syllables?

Vowel Teams (more formally they are called vowel digraphs and diphthongs) most often include two vowels that work together to make one sound.

Sometimes ‘w’ sneaks into these vowel teams and sometimes a vowel paired with other consonants like ‘igh’ work together to create a “vowel team” type pattern.

How Do I Teach Vowel Teams?

Explain to students that we have two vowels touching and working as a team. Sometimes only one vowel will do the talking and sometimes they work together to create a new sliding sound. While we commonly hear the cute saying, “when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking” this isn’t a great rule to teach because it very often isn’t accurate. Instead, we like to use keywords and phrases to help students with patterns.

For example, “the goat stepped on my toe in the snow” could be a way to help students recognize that oa, oe, and ow say /O/. “Eat bread and steak” could help students learn that EA says /E/, /e/, and /A/.

We mark vowel team words by placing a dot above each vowel if it makes a single sound we will connect the dots with a line. If it is a sliding sound, we will connect the dots with a squiggle line. Let’s practice marking!

Print vowel team (vowel digraph & diphthong) worksheets, resources, and other activities!

Several of these vowel teams follow a pattern that students can generalize. Some vowel teams only come at the beginning or middle of a syllable, whereas the other vowel teams that make the same sound only come at the end of a syllable.

For example,

These digital AI & AY lesson resources have been a game changer for our students! Clcik here to check them out. We have included print AND digital lessons, activities, worksheets, and games so that you have whatever you need for your vowel team…

ai comes at the beginning or in the middle of a syllable
ay (that makes the same sound) only comes at the end of a syllable.

For more information about how we teach ai/ay, click here.

When introducing vowel teams, we teach them separately at first.

This means that we use one lesson to teach “ai” explicitly. In our next lesson, we will teach “ay” explicitly. When teaching the patterns we move from the sound pattern to words in isolation (single syllable and then multi-syllable), to sentences, to paragraphs, and then generalization to other texts.

To grab this Vowel Team Game & hundreds of other activities to support phonics and the other core components of literacy, check out our resource library **>>here.<<**

So, how do I actually implement vowel-team practice into my lessons?

After explicitly teaching the vowel-team syllable rules, it is important that students are able to apply their knowledge and practice! We love “gamifying” our word lists to make them more fun and engaging for students. If you laminate your word lists, you can have students use dry-erase markers to find their vowels and divide their words again and again!

Providing this framework for students provides them with that light-bulb aha moment that we as educators are always looking for.

Do you want tools to help?

Helping students understand the syllable types is one of the most effective ways to support reading and SPELLING development. If you want to incorporate the six syllable types into your instruction - check out our SOR-aligned card decks and learn more about the science of reading with our SOR Blueprint. Use the links below to check them out!