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Spelling Vowel-r Words with the Build-a-Word Strategy

Antonio Fierro, Ed.D.
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Produced by Reading Universe, a partnership of WETA, Barksdale Reading Institute, and First Book
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Antonio Fierro: Let's use the build-the-word strategy with a vowel-r pattern. The word is born. I was born in the month of August. What's the word? Born. You say it: born. Let's see how many phonemes or sounds are in the word born. /b/, /or/, /n/. Again: /b/, /or/, /n/. There are three phonemes, so I need three lines: /b/, /or/, /n/. The first phoneme or sound in the word born is /b/. All right. What's the grapheme? 'b'. This is the one that's tricky. This sound here is /or/. Here is my vowel and here is my 'r', my vowel-r. And the final phoneme in the word born is /n/. What about the grapheme? It's the letter 'n' or the grapheme 'n'. All right. Let's spell that: 'b', 'o', 'r', 'n', born.

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