English words can’t end in ‘u’, so ‘w’ (literally a double ‘u’) stands in for the ‘u’ at the end of a base word (e.g. The ‘y’ stands in for the ‘i’ at the end of a base word (e.g. We use the letter ‘y’ in vowel teams because English words can’t end in ‘i’. There is logic to the use of consonants in vowel teams.

How to Teach Vowel Teams – Things You Need to Know Why are consonant letters used in vowel teams? I’ll be using those terms to refer to the sounds represented by vowel teams. I use the terms “weak” and “strong” vowels rather than “short” and “long” vowels as it is hard for young children to understand what is short or long about them (long vowels require two mouth movements rather than one – a bit complicated for a six-year-old!).

The letters ‘y’, ‘w’, ‘gh’ and ‘r’ are also used in representations of vowel sounds (as in ‘ay’, ‘ow’, ‘igh’ and ‘er’), so I quite like using the term ‘vowel teams’ with younger students. The correct terminology for 2 vowels working together to represent one sound is ‘vowel digraph’. We have 18 vowel sounds in English but only 5 vowel letters with which to represent them so it is necessary to use combinations of the vowel letters. To teach vowel teams well, you firstly need to understand how they work. They are the focus of Part 2 of Phonics Hero and additional vowel teams (‘oi’/’oy’, ‘ow’/’ou’, ‘oo’, ‘aw’/’au’) are introduced in Part 3 (get access to lots of free resources in a Teacher Account).

In this blog post, I am going to examine how to teach vowel teams. There are 25 standard vowel teams and, consequently, it is vital that they are taught well. long ‘o’ represented by ‘oa’, ‘ow’, ‘oe’, ‘o_e,’ ‘ough’ and ‘ew’ as in sew). Vowel teams are probably the most common source of reading and spelling errors as one vowel sound may be represented by as many as 6 different vowel teams (e.g.

What are the vowels