3.1 Prepare for Vowel Teams and Diphthongs Instruction

Before you teach, you'll need to do a few things to get ready:

Review the overview of vowel teams and diphthongs so you feel comfortable talking with your students about the sound-symbol correspondences and when to expect them in words.

As you prepare to teach vowel teams, here are some specific things to keep in mind:

• Sound-spelling correspondence(s) of the sound: think about how many ways this vowel sound can be represented in print.
• Generalization of the spelling pattern: some vowel teams are more reliable than others, such as 'ai' and 'ay', while others, like 'ee' and 'ea', are less consistent.
• Pairing of vowel teams for instruction: for some vowel teams it works best to teach them together (opens in new window), such as 'oa' and 'ow', while others, like 'igh' are best to teach on their own.

Word selection is key! As you prepare for instruction, it's important to be intentional about the words you choose to teach. Our free Reading Universe vowel team and diphthong word lists are a good place to start. 

Here are a few important tips for selecting words with vowel teams and diphthongs for your lesson:

• Using the phonics continuum (opens in new window) as a guide, select words with other phonics patterns that you've taught prior to vowel teams and diphthongs, to reinforce what students have already learned.
• To deepen students' understanding of language and build vocabulary, select words with vowel teams or diphthongs that may be unfamiliar to students, like crouch or glee … or words that have multiple meanings, like screen or roast.
• Words with vowel teams and diphthongs have many homophones, for example, no/know and meet/meat. We want to explicitly teach these words and their meanings. We have provided a list of common homophones with vowel teams and diphthongs (opens in new window), as well as guidance on when to teach them.
• Embed high-frequency words with vowel teams and diphthongs — like keep and how — into your phonics instruction to give students meaningful opportunities to practice reading and spelling them in isolation and in context.
• As students become more comfortable with spelling words with vowel teams and diphthongs, use phrases and sentences that include these patterns in your dictation to add rigor and context to your lesson.
• After students have had plenty of practice with vowel teams and diphthongs in single syllable words and you have taught students to read and spell multisyllabic words, you can add words with two syllables such as delay or flower.

Flash Cards

A flash card warm-up helps students connect letters and sounds, builds fluency, and prepares them to read. You'll want to run through syllable types you have previously taught with your class, so here are flashcards for printing:

• Closed Syllable Flash Cards (opens in new window)
• Open Syllable Flash Cards (opens in new window)
• Magic 'e' Flash Cards (opens in new window)
• R-Controlled Syllable Flash Cards (opens in new window)

Print and Prep Your Cards

For your direct and explicit instruction about vowel teams and diphthongs, print out these two flash card sets: 

• Vowel Team Flash Cards with Pictures
• Vowel Team Flash Cards without Pictures

You might want to write examples of words with vowel teams and diphthongs on the back of your flash cards. It's helpful to have examples of words readily available for your students.

Dictation Paper

Daily dictation can help students with listening skills, auditory memory, reading and spelling skills, language, and handwriting.

Go to the Resource Hub for a complete collection of word lists, read sheets, and decodables for practicing reading and writing words that have vowel teams and diphthongs.

The Reading Universe lesson plans integrate specific teaching strategies for teaching children to spell and read words and sentences with vowel teams and diphthongs, including flash cards, elkonin boxes, build-a-word, and word chaining strategies. We use a combination of these strategies as we have students practice sounds, words in isolation, phrases, and sentences.