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School and the City

Ideas and Resources for Your Elementary Classroom

Improve Fluency with Vowel Intensive Drills

A vowel intensive drill is the perfect way to open a small group lesson for students struggling with phonological awareness. Benefits include strengthening awareness of medial sounds, vowel sounds, and phoneme-grapheme correspondences. 

How It Works:

Each student gets a set of vowel tents. You can give them all of the vowels at once, or you can give 2 or 3 at a time. (When I first start this with students, I only give them a couple to teach the routine and scaffold as needed.)

You, the teacher, will need a word list. I get my word lists from iReady or my favorite GoPhonics Word List Book. 

You will say a word, students will repeat it, then they will hold up the tent that represents the vowel sound within the word. 

For example…

  • Teacher: “Say ‘bug’”
  • Students: “bug”
  • Students: hold up U tent
  • Students: “U spells /u/”

Keep repeating this process until your students become more fluent! Gradually make the words a bit more challenging by using words that have blends or digraphs. 

Easy Differentiation for Group Needs:

  • Change up the number of tents you use. Some groups of students may only be able to handle/differentiate between 2 at a time. 
  • Strategically choose tents based on commonly-confused sounds. My students always seem to get /e/ and /i/ confused, so we often use only those tents for extra intensive practice. 
  • Use images instead of letters 
  • DIY vowel tents for vowel teams and other vowel sounds (Students love making them!)

Need These Vowel Tents?

No problem! You can download them for free right here.

The More You Know…

What is the science of reading?

The science of reading is more than just a buzzword – It’s science. And although it may seem like a trend, it’s not new. It’s 30+ years of research on how the human brain learns to read. It’s not what we’re teaching, but how we teach it. 

Years of evidence shows that 95% of students are cognitively capable of learning how to read. In order to make this happen, we have to provide evidence-based, explicit, systematic literacy instruction. 

Who am I?

Hi! I’m Kristin. I’m currently working full-time as a literacy coach and interventionist in a public elementary school. I have completed LETRS training for teachers and administrators, and I’m trained as a local LETRS facilitator. Thanks for being here! Other than this website, my favorite place to hang out is on Instagram @schoolandthecity.

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