Children learn to read and spell using phonics. Those phonics skills include: letter-sound correspondences, letter-sound relationships and sound-symbol associations.
My steps to teaching students how to read and spell include:
1. Can my student recognize each letter by sight?
2. Can my student sound out each letter?
3. Can my student recognize the letter I am sounding out?
4. Does my student understand that words make up a variety of spelling patterns (CV, CVC, etc.)
5. Can my student recognize and pronounce blends (th, sh, wh, bl, etc.)
Students must also understand that when reading a word, they must first identify the most common sounds of each letter, then blend the sounds together.
It's important to remember that in the English language not every word is said the way it is spelled. I call those words, "Sight Words." Sight words need to be identified automatically and there are about 100 of them for Pre-K/Kindergarten. I use the Fry word list over the Dolch word list because the Dolch word list has not been updated in decades.
Once students are able to identify words automatically and have an effective strategy for decoding unknown words, they will be able to read successfully, independently and construct meaning from the text.
Now back to the short and long vowel sounds...
Vowels are the building block of words. There are 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) in the English language, but each vowel makes two different sounds; long and short sounds. For short vowel sounds you sound out the letter and for long vowel sounds you say the letter. Understanding this concept allows students to become successful readers.
To teach this skill I made an anchor chart, watched two different videos and then we practiced using worksheets. The videos include ONE and TWO.
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