Improve Fluency with Vowel Intensive Drills
A vowel intensive drill is the perfect way to open a small group lesson for students struggling with phonological awareness. Benefits include strengthening awareness of medial sounds, vowel sounds, and phoneme-grapheme correspondences. How It Works: Each student gets a set of vowel tents. You can give them all of the vowels at once, or you can give 2 or 3 at a time. (When I first start this with students, I only give them a couple to teach the routine and scaffold as needed.) You, the teacher, will need a word list. I get my word lists from iReady or my favorite GoPhonics Word List Book. You will say a word, students will repeat it, then they will hold up the tent that represents the vowel sound within the word. For example… Teacher: “Say ‘bug’” Students: “bug” Students: hold up U tent Students: “U spells /u/” Keep repeating this process until your students become more fluent! Gradually make the words a bit more challenging...