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MONKEY SOUNDSã
Teaching Short
Vowels in the Early Years
Dealing with vowels in spelling and reading can be a real hurdle for many children in the early years of literacy learning. Children can either confuse vowels (a with e... a with u... e with i...) or in spelling, they may leave them out altogether. Teaching the spelling of vowel sounds to students is difficult. There are resources full of exercises to practise spelling with vowels, but not many that actually teach children about vowels. We need to develop their understanding of vowel sounds. After all, what is a vowel? How do you explain it to a child? Where do you begin?
MONKEY SOUNDS makes teaching about vowels fun. It is structured, systematic, explicit ... and fun.
A vowel is a MONKEY SOUND, you see, and the program takes you through the reasons why.
...but what do undies and old
oranges have to do with the teaching of vowel sounds???
... and why is this monkey holding up these placards? (below)
This (right) is the Make-A-Word activity, a fantastic activity that teaches encoding and decoding with regular consonant-vowel-consonant words.
MONKEY SOUNDS encourages children to think about vowels in general and to learn more specifically to distinguish between the short vowels a,e,i,o,u, in both reading and spelling. It can be used individually or with a whole class, in prevention or remediation programmes. MONKEY SOUNDS has been tailored to the teaching of vowel sounds in Australian classrooms...because let's face it, the Australian pronunciation of vowels is very different to that of non-Australian speakers. (We even vary state to state in the way we pronounce some vowels - and the programme accommodates for this.
The CD ROM includes 149 pages to print out, copy, cut up, laminate...plus loads of pictures to view on a computer or Smartboard. (Both Victorian Cursive and Non-cursive materials areprovided on each disk.)
It also includes:
 | AN OVERVIEW of vowel sounds, vowel letter options and reasons why vowels are tricky to master for some children. |
| VOWEL AWARENESS ACTIVITIES: Experiment with all sorts of vowel sounds and learn how they are different to consonant sounds... with the help of monkey characters. Teaching vowel sounds has never been so... noisy! |
| LOTS OF PICTURES OF THE 5 MONKEYS (5 VOWELS): Includes a story about each monkey, a hand cue to link to the sound and the letter that most commonly matches the sound. Includes colour pictures to hang around the classroom or on table-tops as reminders. Also includes black and white line drawings for students to colour in as they think and talk about the vowel sounds. |
| ACTIVITIES AND MORE PICTURES that encourage spelling and reading with vowels along with exercises that target the most commonly confused vowel sounds. Flashcards of contrast pairs (eg. bag vs. bug) highlight the difference between the difficult sounds... all with the help of the monkeys of course! |
| A COLOUR PICTURE OF THE HAND CUES for each vowel sound. |
| MORE ACTIVITIES AND MORE PICTURES to experiment with vowel letters and the words they can make. |
COST AU$50.00
The Speech Vowel Set explores all of the 21 vowel sounds in the English language (including dipthongs and a tripthong). It is the next step for children who have mastered the five short vowel sounds.
(Don't know what a dipthong or tripthong is? Ask your local friendly speech pathologist).