Super Motivating Vowel Team Activities

Activities for ages 5 to 8.

On the hunt for fun ways to teach kids vowel teams including -AY, -IE and -OA?! Silly rhymes can be an incredibly helpful way to teach kids important reading rules. This one’s pretty brilliant. These motivating games and eye catching posters teach new readers what happens when two vowels go walking together. {I’ll give you a hint: the first one does the talking.}

Grab your vowel team super pack in our shop or on Teachers Pay Teachers!

Introducing Vowel Teams

When I’m teaching kids what happens when two vowels are written side-by-side, I always start by introducing a memorable poem.

“When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.”

Optional add-on: “The second one goes out for tea.”

To help those visual learners who remember things best when they see it, I bring out a set of memorable posters to help the concept really stick. There’s one for each of the nine vowel teams included in the set: -ie, -ee, ue, -ae, -oa, oe, -ui, -ay, -ai.

Vowel Team Games

Then I have kids play a variety of games to make practicing the trick super motivating and fun.

Children read, sort and glue vowel team words on the word sort sheets. {I included four different versions of this one so you could give students plenty of practice.}

Students say and spell the words.

They clip the missing vowel team with a clothespin.

In Roll and Write, children roll a die, read the word that lands on top and write it in the matching column. {There’s a die and sheet for all nine vowel teams.}

Then they play several motivating rounds of Bingo.

In Real or Nonsense, children roll two dice to make a word, read that word out loud and write it in either the real or nonsense column of their game sheet. There’s guaranteed to be some giggling when kids roll some of those made-up words.