Count those vowels

A section in Where Is That Vowel? contains compound words.

The students are instructed to count the vowel sounds to determine how many small words are within the larger word. For instance in aircraft, you have the vowel team ai in air and an a between two consonants with no other vowel in sight. Therefore, you have two vowel sounds so you will have two separate words. They would then recognize the cr as a beginning consonant blend and divide the word in front of the cr.

There are 625 words in this lesson to reinforce vowel recognition by sight. Handling the longer words in this way will help alleviate the heebie-jeebies when approaching lengthy words while reading independently. Hopefully the repetitiveness will reinforce their decoding skills when needed. Reverse the process for a good spelling workout.

Instead of fixing on each letter of a word, or perceiving one word at a time, the longer words encourage a reader to take in larger images. The intention is to broaden one’s recognition span thereby enabling the reader to see more with each eye fixation. In this mode a reader would be prone to expand his recognition span and take in phrases rather than single units of speech. The huge benefit? The result is increased comprehension of the material.

It is also valuable to discuss the definition of each separate word and the difference the combination makes.