Vowel teams

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Common core standards

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Classroom Activities

  • Adrian Bruce's Vowel Team Card Game is a printable card game that has students practice reading words with vowel teams. It's played liked Crazy 8s with drEAm matching brEAk and change cards.

  • Space Aces is a fun printable file folder game that can be used for any vowel dipthong. The board is pretty and students love the rocket cards. The catches are that there are only 6 words for each vowel dipthong so you will definitely need to add more words. Also, reading the words is pretty easy for most students, so you can add in another layer where one partner reads the word to the other and the second student has to spell it. It gets both partners engaged. There are no clear rules on what happens if you finish the “mission” so come up with something like spaceships for them to x out every time they spell a word correctly to give the game more of a point.

  • BBC Schools Words and Pictures has a variety of printable classroom activities and games that focus on vowel dipthongs and long vowel patterns. Activities include phonics board games, make your own poems activities and silly sentence strips.

Cyber games and activities

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| Professor Garfield's memory game has different levels ranging from short vowels to dipthongs. The game is pretty basic (try to get two matching sounds) but the program does read the words to you which adds in a little more learning.
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| BBC Education Dynamo Den is a spelling practice game. The first level shows the student a word like house and then gives them the letters to spell it. By the third level, they are given the letters for the word and whole bunch of other, distracting letters.
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| BBC Schools Sandcastle Game lets the students choose which vowel combination they're working on (oi and oy, ow and ou, etc) and then has them choose the correct sound to end a word (e.g. oi or oy for f--l?). It's really similar to a SoftSchools game, but the animation is much better and the narrator has an English accent.
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| BBC School Long Vowels Spelling Game has the students fill in the blank with the correct vowels (sl--p, ee). Not super entertaining, but good practice.
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| Earobics Alien Space Trash Game is pretty sure to be a hit. There are weird looking aliens who make weird sounds and try to capture trash. The narrator says a word like "cow" and the students have to capture the sounds as they float around the screen. Getting the alien to actually capture the trash and not overshoot takes some practice, but your students will probably master it in one tenth the time it takes you.
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| Foam Phonemes is an activity more than a game. Students choose the vowel teams they want to work with and the consonants and the program helps them sound out the word.
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| Picnic on Pluto has students feed two aliens. One only eats fake words and the other only eats real words. Good for practicing real vs. made up words.
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| Starfall Vowel Sort has students sort words with vowel teams. It is Starfall and the game seems aimed at much younger students with a preference for high pitched voices.

iPad apps

Free Worksheets

  • Multi-page worksheets


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| PBS Kids' When Two Vowels Go Walking video is a folksy animated video in the style of School House Rock. PBS doesn't let you link directly to the video, so scroll down the video selection until you see it.
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| Starfall When Vowels Go Walking video is slightly creepy, but also gets the point across.

At home

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