Fun and Quick Short Vowel Activities

Short vowel sounds tend to be fairly difficult for students to learn. They may have trouble distinguishing some of the sounds, such as ‘i’ and ‘e.’ This means they need lots of practice, using fun and quick short vowel activities for listening and also for reading.

When students start out with a weakness in the discrimination of vowel sounds, it follows that their spelling will suffer. And until they can master these sounds they will unfortunately struggle with reading across all grade levels.

Easy Short Vowel Activities

Teaching with visual and kinesthetic activities are effective ways to help your students with short vowels sounds.

Sand Writing

Prepare this activity well in advance by starting a collection – a pack of paper plates is probably cheapest, but you can use anything you have spare – sand trays don’t need to be pretty! Add salt or sand – colored sand is always great fun! Just pour some sand onto your chosen objects for each of your students. Then say a short vowel sound, or a word containing that sound. Students can then write the letter in the sand while saying the sound and/or letter name. Another option for sand writing is to use the free Sand Draw app! Definitely less messy! Add magnetic letters for those students who still require some help with letter formation.

Sand tray for practicing writing short vowels

Picture Card Sorting

This simple but effective activity is a quick way for students to practice distinguishing short vowel sounds. You will need some picture cards. Have students work with no more than 2 or 3 sounds at a time. They can sort the pictures into columns or rows based on the vowel sound. They should then name each picture and say the vowel sound aloud.

Short Vowel Craft Stick ‘Puppets’

These are super fun to make! Every classroom usually has loads of these lying around in boxes somewhere! Perfect for craft, but also perfect to make fun short vowel ‘puppets’ – students just love them! If you don’t have any, they can be bought cheaply from Amazon. I use the giant craft sticks, as these are less fiddly for little hands. This pack of 500 is a great deal with a 43% discount (affiliate). The teacher should say a word, students repeat the word, identify the short vowel sound and hold the correct ‘puppet’ aloft. Begin by asking them to say the sound as they hold up their puppets, but this could also be extended to the letter name and sound. Example: A says /a/

Short Vowel Fluency Strips

When completing these sorts of activities, students can often appear to be successful, but it is important to remember that the real test comes when they actually begin to apply their learning in the context of reading ‘real’ texts. However, many students may require a transition stage, where they practice fluency first. Fluency strips are the perfect solution! They read a strip full of words, where the short vowel changes with each word. Students are required to pay very close attention to the changes. This type of activity is great for transitioning to ‘real text’. They are also useful in small group work, where students can demonstrate the progress they are making with accuracy and pace.

extension game

Short Chunks

Use letter cards or magnetic letters to make word chunks with the vowel sounds. For example, you can chunk ‘a’ and ‘m’ together to make -am. Then brainstorm to make as many words as you can out of that chunk, such as ‘ham’ or ‘ram.’ There are so many variations of short chunks in this activity that you may want to do a quick 5 minutes in the morning or before dismissal. I have also completed this activity in teams, with a timer – rewards for winners should be made clear beforehand!

Incorporating CVC practice all year long, in as many ways as possible, will set your students on the road to being good readers. How do you practice short vowel sounds?