Once your child is able to recognize letters and their sounds the next step is to learn to read 3 letter words with the consonant, vowel, consonant pattern. These are words such as: man, fan, bat, cat, mop, fun. Here are some printable word lists. Teaching short vowels can be done in a variety of fun ways. Here are my favorites.
1. Roll and Read games
I LOVE incorporating the roll and read activity into my classroom. I have created a template of a blank roll and read worksheet. That way I can quickly create words or sentences exactly tailored to my class. After that, all you need is dice. Place students in pairs with one worksheet and one dice. Students will take turns rolling the dice and reading whatever set of words or sentence is next to the number they rolled. Their partner is there to check for accuracy. They can help the reader if they mispronounce a word or get stuck. This is a great game to use to informally monitor students’ progress in reading. The whole class is engaged but you have the opportunity to move around and listen to each group reading individually.
You can download my free roll and read games for letters and phonics sounds.
2. Short Stories
It is important that children begin to read short vowel words in context. These websites allow you to print or view simple stories with short vowel words.
- The Measured Mom: has tons of printable phonics books you can download for free.
- This Reading Mama: has more free printable books for each word family. These books are slightly more difficult than the books from Measured Mom because the sentences are more complex and there are more sentences per page.
- Little Fox: has animated vooks (video books) on Youtube based on different word families. I usually take a screen shot of each page in the video so that I can read through the story slowly with my students. Then we watch the video together. They love these stories!
3. Build CVC words
Write short vowel words on index cards then have your child spell these words using magnet letters, Scrabble tiles, or laminated letters. Write letters on beans or Legos and have them build words with those too! The possibilities are endless.
Finally, you can print these free CVC word puzzles and have your child practice putting them together.
CVC words are one component of a complete phonics reading strategy. If you want to read more about teaching phonics and strategies to support your child’s reading, check out my related posts by clicking on the images below.
