Long A Vowel Sound
This was my first week to start teaching some of my own lessons in the classroom. This particular lesson was geared toward spelling, writing and reading words with the Long A vowel sound. Since the beginning of the school year in August, students have been working with short vowel sounds only, so this was their first experience with the long vowel sounds. They were familiar that the letter "a" had two sounds, but just never used the long a sound in reading or writing lessons. The lesson specifically focused on the CVCe pattern, introducing the Magic E.
I found an awesome lesson idea from (http://blog.maketaketeach.com/diy-magic-e-wands/) This site provides a free template with short a words such as "cap" or "tap" with a star at the end of the words. Students each were made a wand with the letter "e" in the star, for the Magic E. Students placed their star from the wands at the end of the short a words, and then read the new word with the long a vowel. I really liked this concept because it still had students practice reading words with the short a sound, and introduced them to the long a sound and how to recognize the words with that Magic E on the end. I used a lot of cueing "Magic E makes "A" say it's name! A-A-A-!!!" and students were successful in correcting their mistakes and reading the words with long and short vowel sounds!
I showed an example first and then had students take turns to read the words with both the short and long vowel sounds. The awesome thing about this website is that the template provides words for all vowels, and not just one! I plan to introduce the rest of the long vowel sounds using this strategy as well. The students loved it, and it was effective in teaching the concept!! I look forward to using it again in the future!
Miss Underwood
