How to Teach the OU Spelling Rule

Hey there!

This month is all about tips & tricks for teaching vowel teams. Next in the series is the “ou” vowel team.

How to Teach the OU Vowel Team

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!

Where your students might get stuck with “ou”

While students might remember the sounds of “ou,” things can get tricky because other vowel teams also have these sounds. The /ow/ sound in “trout” is the same as the /ow/ sound in “plow.” The /oo/ sound in “soup” is the same as the /oo/ sound in “moon.”

When students have to spell, they might go back and forth between different vowel teams. For example, if a student is trying to spell “chowder” they might remember that “ou” says /ow/ and spell it “chouder.” This is where practice and visual memory (and spell check!) will come into play.

We highly recommend using a visual anchor to help your students remember the sounds. We particularly like “trout soup” because, as we said before, it’s not an easy thing to forget! Could you imagine what trout soup would be like?

We also like having our key phrase to help students with the sounds & understanding which is most common. We put the “trout” sound first because it is more common than the “soup” sound.

For information about how we structure our vowel team lessons, >>click here!<< and then grab our OU lesson from our Teachers Pay Teachers Store so that you have all of the materials you need to teach the OU vowel team to your students!