How to Teach the oi/oy Spelling Rule

Hey there, friend! We hope that you have been loving our Vowel Team Spelling Rules series lately.

We get questions all the time from parents/educators/SLPs about how we structure our vowel team lessons and we wanted to share this information with you!

Teaching the oi/oy vowel teams

I always love the oi/oy vowel teams because it is the first (if you are following our scope and sequence) of the sliding sounds. My students always seem to think that the /oi/ sound is funny, which makes them more engaged with these lessons.

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.”

Our key phrase to help students remember this is “Destroy the Poison.”

How to Make Vowel Teams Stick

We have found that tying a visual to the phonograms is extremely helpful for our students while they are learning anything, but this is especially true when learning their vowel teams.

When they are getting stuck, a simple cue with either the word “destroy” or the image we use for poison is enough to jog their memory and help them figure out how to read or spell the word they were working on. You can find our OI/OY activities on Teachers Pay Teachers!

For more information on vowel teams, how we teach them, and why we teach them the way that we do, click here.