Long Vowels

       In the second half of the year, we start to run in to long vowel words.  There is the strategy 'flip the vowel,' where you try the opposite vowel sound in the word.  For example - if a student read bake as "back," you might say 'flip the vowel.'  They would say the long a sound and say "bake."  This might work with some words (like kite, bike, pipe, open), but what happens when you run into a word like seat.  Some students may try to sound out all the letters and come up with s-e-a-t (blend the short vowels together and you get a weird word).
       After mentioning the 'flip the vowel' strategy, I teach two tips: look for "Super E!" (a.k.a. VCe words) or "Talkers and Walkers? " (a.k.a. vowel teams).

• Super E - we learn that if there's a vowel - consonant - e, the e jumps over the consonant and bumps the vowel to say its name like in like, bike, rake, pipe.  We talk about the e having to be at the end of the word or the end of the syllable, but I don't expect the kids to be able to identify where the syllable break is.  Click here for a video I show the students.
• Talkers and Walkers - we learn that if there are two vowels next to each other, the first one does the talking(says it's long name) and the second one does the walking (or listens - its silent).  Some examples would be beat, beet, neat, plain, rain, day.  Click here for a video I show the students.
• We talk about how most of the time these rules work, BUT there's always rule breakers like in sight words come, are, some, have, said or in other words like in students' names or in words like boy or open.  
• As fluent readers, we know this, but someone learning how to read, they need to be taught it, then it will become automatic and the kids won't even think about it (like we don't think about it as adults).  I saw this from "I Love Lucy."  It's not related to long vowels, but helps us adults remember that our language can have some funny twists to it :).