Teaching Long and Short A with Games

Ready to Learn Short and Long Vowel Sounds

Is your child ready for first grade? If so, it's time to work with learning vowel sounds. Let's start at the beginning and teach about the long and short A sound. First, the short A makes the sound you hear in words like back, ban, bank, and bat. The long A sound is heard in words like bake and bay.

Play a Game to Learn the Sounds

Here's a game I play with my son to teach him to recognize short and long A sounds. Below you will see five dice. Click the file below on a sheet of card stock or thick sheet of paper. You will need three pages in all. Ask your child to cut out each die. Then assemble the dice, taping the ends together.

Letter Dice A Fun

With your child, toss all five dice. Each of you should work for a set amount of time (depending on the child, set your own time limit), and try to create as many words as possible with the letters that land facing up. You and your child should each write these words on a sheet of paper. Then, to determine who wins the game, each person gets one point for each word. Then, if the child correctly identifies the word as having a long A or short A sound, the child gets an additional point. before the game, plan to play until one player get to a particular point value. We like to play to 25.

For example, if you roll an ACK, AKE, B, T, and V, a child may list words like back, bake, tack, and take. He's get 4 points for the words with 4 bonus points for identifying back and tack as having a short A sound and bake and take having a long A sound.That's eight points for the first round.

Game Pieces

Click HERE to download the dice for the game.

Extra Practice

If you'd like to work with some long A and short A words before you begin the game, here's the list of ending sounds from the dice. We used these ending for writing practice and spelling tests when we added letters to the beginning.

Short A Sounds

• ack
• an
• ank
• ap
• at

Long A Sounds

• ail
• ake
• ate
• ay

I hope you enjoy this lesson. Be sure to check back to my follow my blog, follow me on Twitter at @littleblogfish and on Facebook at Little Blogfish.

Recommended Fun Read-- Suzy Mule: Teaches Long Vowel Sounds


Enjoy,
Little Blogfish
www.littleblogfish.blogspot.com