Articles tagged with: vowel teams

What is…a vowel team?

Posted on 6th November 20231st November 2023 in Approaches to Teaching Reading and tagged vowel teamsLeave a Comment

In our ‘what is…’ series we’re taking things back to basics! From phonics to decoding, blending and more, we’re going to break things down and give you our expert advice on each area, to help answer any questions you may have around teaching reading. *** ‘Vowel team’ is a term used mostly in the USA […]

Split digraph, Vowel+e, Bossy e, Silent e, magic e – why and how to teach it

Posted on 6th June 20223rd June 2024 in Decodable Books, Dyslexia, Learning to Read, Reading Difficulties, Reading Resources, Synthetic Phonics and tagged article, beginner readers, bossy e, catch-up readers, decodable books, decoding, magic e, pronunciation, silent e, spelling, split digraphs, teaching phonics, VCe, vowel digraphs, vowel sounds. long vowel sounds, vowel teamsLeave a Comment

The split digraphs ‘a-e’, ‘e-e’, ‘i-e’, ‘o-e’, ‘u-e’ are very common spellings. They have different names: Silent e, Magic e, Vowel Consonant e, Bossy e, Split digraphs. Many children struggle to read words with these spelling patterns, so we need to teach them explicitly. Why do we have these spelling patterns in English? The ‘e’ […]

Why sorting words is an important activity

Posted on 8th October 202129th May 2024 in Learning to Read and tagged #learning to read, alternative spellings, article, beginner readers, decodable books, Extended Alphabetic Code, phonics resources, sorting activities, teach kids to read, teaching phonics, vowel digraphs, vowel teams2 Comments

I recently listened to the much-anticipated webinar given by the Reading Ape. (If you haven’t heard of the elusive Reading Ape, do check out the website which has fantastic research-based articles about reading.) Anyway, the Reading Ape discussed the research of Cattell, 1886, that showed that we read words quicker than we read individual letters. […]

Scope and sequence – what does this mean?

Posted on 16th September 202129th May 2024 in Learning to Read and tagged article, beginner readers, phonic progression, scope and sequence, systematic phonics, the Alphabetic Code, vowel digraphs, vowel teams, what is scope and sequence?Leave a Comment

All phonics programmes should have a ‘scope and sequence’ but what does this actually mean? ‘Scope’ means what you are teaching When teaching reading with systematic phonics, ‘scope’ means teaching the Alphabetic Code. English has 44 sounds and more than 175 spellings for those sounds. So, do we need to teach them all? Which are […]