3. How to Teach 'y' as a Vowel

In this section we are going to walk you through the steps for teaching 'y' as a vowel to your students:

• 3.1 Prepare for Instruction — Get ready and gather the materials you need.
• 3.2 Explicitly Teach the Skill — See how to introduce the new information to students.

At Reading Universe we use an evidence-based approach popularly known as structured literacy. Structured literacy is a way of organizing and delivering reading instruction to ensure students get all the skills they need in an efficient timeframe — and without any gaps. With this approach, teachers use explicit or direct instruction. Read more about structured literacy here.

We recommend a daily phonics lesson routine that looks something like this:

Here are suggestions on how to implement these steps into your routine: 

• Your lesson will start with a quick phonemic awareness activity or Listening Game. For 'y' as a vowel, the listening game could include adding /ī/ or /ē/ to the end of a word. For example, you may say a word like trick and have students add /ē/ to the end, making the word tricky.
• The Warm Up includes a review of previously taught sounds or syllable patterns using flash cards. If you are working with one-syllable words, you can review sounds or patterns your students have already have learned like consonants, vowels, blends, digraphs, and glued sounds. When you are teaching multisyllabic words, you can include syllables that will be used in words later in the lesson. For example, if you plan to practice decoding the words candy, party, and fifty in your lesson, you can include the syllables can-, par-, and fif- in your flash cards. Remember, you can make your own flash cards to match the words you will be working with!

• New/Review is where you will introduce 'y' as a vowel. Depending upon the level of your students, you may be working with one-syllable words or multisyllabic words.
• During Dictation, students will practice spelling words with 'y' as a vowel that they just learned.
• All of this leads up to the last portion of the lesson when students will practice putting all the skills together and Reading with Fluency.