Short vowel sounds are what I call the superheroes of reading!

So what are short vowel sounds? Let me tell you.  They are one of the most important things to teach children as they begin their reading journey.

However, before diving into exactly what short vowel sounds are, we first need to understand the importance of all of our vowel sounds in English.

Have you ever tried to say the word ‘cat’ without opening your mouth?  Go on, have a try!  It’s impossible isn’t it.
This next bit of information may blow your mind as it did mine when I first learnt about it.  Did you know that…

A vowel sound opens your mouth and a consonant blocks the air flow at some point.

Like me, you may start going through the alphabet to test it out and get to the letter ‘c’ and say, ‘aha’, you have to open your mouth for the ‘c’ sound, (as I did too).

However, if you say the /c/ sound you will notice that your tongue lifts up and closes the opening to your throat.  It is not until you add the vowel sound that the air can escape.

Try slowly sounding out this word and see how both the /c/ and the /t/ closes at some point in your mouth.  The ‘c’ closes at the back of your tongue and the ‘t’ closes with your teeth, WOW!!

c   a   t 

This is why our vowels are the super power sounds in our language.

In fact a word cannot be a word without a vowel sound.

The vowel sounds help us to blend those closed sounds (consonants) together to make words.
The short vowels are what we teach children first and I often find that they are also one of the most common forms of confusion  in reading and spelling.

So what are short vowel sounds?

Short vowel sounds are the sounds that our vowels make when they are by themselves and when they are closed in by a consonant.

For example:-  cat  hat  man  ship  top

I like to give students actions for these short vowel sounds to help them become automatic.  The actions that I have found most helpful for my students are listed below.
(Just for future reference in this blogpost, when you see these straight brackets around letters, it refers to the sound that the letter makes /  /.)

Get your students to try out these actions to learn the short vowel sounds.

What is the difference between short and long vowels?

It has nothing to do with how long you stretch the sound out.  You can stretch out the short vowel sound for ‘a’ and it doesn’t become a long vowel.

A long vowel sound is when the letter says its name.

So the long vowel sound for A is its name ᾱ.  The line on top of the letter is a symbol that shows us that the ‘a’ is saying its long sound, its name.

This is why it is important to also teach your children the letter names as well as the letter sounds.

• Once a child is familiar with the sounds and able to use actions to show what they can hear in words, I will then introduce them to the letter / alphabetic code that represents the sound.
• Notice I introduce the letter sound first.  This is the best way for children to form strong connections in their brains to the sounds of our language and the code we use to read and write.  After all, our language primarily starts with speaking.  This is what we call ‘speech to print’.

Sounds first, letters later.

You will notice in my short vowel sound action posters that they have the letter name and the sound.  This helps the child hear both the long and the short form of the vowels when they perform the action.

***If your child is struggling to hear these short vowel sounds, I encourage you to go back to my previous blog post about phonological awareness where I talk all about the learning that needs to take place before phonics can be successful.***

Phonics is the step where you introduce the child to the symbol that represents the sound.

Once you start to introduce your child to phonics, which is the putting together of the sound with the symbol, there are many activities you can use that are a fun way to consolidate these most important sounds.

Let’s get back to short vowel sounds…

Activities for short vowel sounds

There are many things you can do to help children learn their short vowel sounds.
You can download a FREE COPY of my short vowel action posters ⬅️ here and print them onto card.

Here are some ideas of how you can use them.

• Laminate them for longevity and then place them on the floor.  Grab a list of short vowel words and read them out to your child. Once the child hears the word they must either jump onto the short vowel picture or throw a beanbag onto it.  Have some fun with it.
• You can find some examples of short vowel words inside of each of my short vowel sounds card games.  In these games a child must read the short vowel ‘rime’ at the top of the card and the words with this sound below.  You can place down a card with the same colour or the same sound.   It’s so much fun and has lots of reading fluency practice with the short vowel sounds.

Grab the free game here.  You can also purchase games for each short vowel and within each game are short vowel word family lists you can send home for fluency practice.

Here is an example of just one of the short vowel word lists included inside of my games.

Another option for use

• Put the short vowel action posters onto the wall, read out a word and give your child a ball to throw at the right short vowel sound.  This is also great for gross motor skills, and research has proven that multisensory learning really does help with retention and learning.

Songs are another great way to help children learn things and this little song on Youtube is a perfect way to help kids learn these short vowel sounds. 

Thanks to A* List.  English Learning Videos for Kids  for making this great video.

Digital Activities for a Fun Assessment

• These really fun digital google slides activities are really great to give to my students to practice those short vowel sounds.  It is self checking so they can see if they have clicked the wrong answer and try again.  Here is a picture of one of the slides.

The child must look at the picture and figure out which short vowel sound fits into the word.  This really gets them segmenting the sounds to find the vowel sound in the middle.   They then click one of the vowels and it will send them to a screen that either tells them they got it right or asks them to try again.

These are great for parents who want to give their struggling readers an activity that is self paced and they can do at home.  Especially great to help with the summer slide that often happens in the holiday season.

As a teacher, I find this activity a great tool to assess whether my student has learnt the short vowel sounds and which ones might need more practice.

If you are looking for more short vowel sounds activities check out my short vowels category in my TPT store.

I hope that you have learnt a little more about ‘what are short vowel sounds?’, throughout this post and the importance of short vowel sounds for learning to read.  Keep an eye out for future blog posts where I will be talking a little more about the more tricky long vowel sounds to come!

I would love to see how you use your free short vowel action posters.  Feel free to post photos of them in use and share them with me by tagging me on instagram or facebook.

The more we grow and learn as parents and teachers, the more we can equip our kids for reading success!!

Leave a comment below and let me know what you found helpful.  My aim is to provide you with all the help I can to help your beginning or struggling readers to succeed.

If your child is really struggling I would love for you to download my free guide to show you what you can do to help them and the important things you need to consider on the journey to get your child reading well.   Grab it below.

Happy Teaching

Till next time..