Vowel Teams - The Reading & Spelling Rules That Nobody Taught You

Hey friend,

Thanks for sticking with us and our series of “The Reading & Spelling Rules Nobody Taught You.”

Today we are going to talk about…

Vowel Teams

A vowel team is when you have two vowels that work together to make one sound. Think about words like rain, play, boil, sound, and goat.

Vowel team syllables are the fifth syllable type we introduce to our students

Why we introduce phonograms by syllable type

When we work with students, we scaffold our syllable type instruction by working through a progression of closed, VCE, R-Controlled, and open syllables before moving onto vowel teams (and then stable final).

We introduce patterns by syllable type so that students can organize the rules we teach them into “buckets.” We have found that this is much more effective than trying to teach them several syllable types at once (i.e. trying to teach them all of the long ‘A’ patterns like bake, rain, play, weigh, stable. etc.).

What Vowel Teams Say

When we look at a vowel team, we see two vowels (and the occasional consonant like in ‘ow’ or ‘igh’) that are working together to make one sound.

If our students recognize these patterns at all, they usually remember the saying "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking."  While this works for some vowel teams (ai says /A/ like in rain), it doesn't work for all of them (ea says /A/ in steak). It works for about half of the vowel team patterns so it’s important we make this clear to our students, and systematically and explicitly introduce the other sounds and patterns as well.

For a comprehensive list of the vowel teams we teach, what they say, AND the order in which we teach them, >>CLICK HERE.<<

How We Teach Vowel Teams

It is important that we teach students each of the vowel teams’ sounds explicitly, just like we explicitly teach the rules in the other 5 syllable types, Closed, Magic E, Bossy R, Open, and Stable Final.

We start by explaining that there are two different kinds of vowel teams. Digraphs and Diphthongs (sliding sounds). Your digraphs are going to be vowel teams like ai, ay, ee, ey, oa, oe, etc. When you read them, they make one clear (and familiar - hopefully) vowel sound. Your sliding sounds are teams like oi and oy, and ou/ow. These still only make one sound, but it isn't quite a clear and familiar vowel sound (think oy like in boy or ow like in plow).  

Many of our vowel teams make more than one sound. When this happens, we rely really heavily on key phrases and pictures to help cement the rules for our students. Let's use oo as an example. OO has two sounds and we teach this by using the key phrase "look at the moon." Take a second and say that out loud to yourself. Do you hear the different sounds?

If you are looking for more resources to provide effective phonics instruction, click below to learn more about the 5CCL Activity Library, which has hundreds of SOR-aligned resources for phonics (and all the other core components of literacy) instruction.