Long Vowels

Hello! Welcome to the Startup Reading, Book 2, Long Vowels.

The primary objective of this workbook is to introduce students to a reading strategy to address the most pressing challenge in the early stages of reading which is identifying the vowel sound in words.

The lessons start with a review of the consonant sounds which the students practiced in Book 1.

Then students are guided in a step-by-step process to identify if a letter in a word is a vowel or consonant. This is an essential step for students to transition from identifying letters to reading words.

Now the fun begins! Students will be introduced to the vowels through the Reading Code and will continue to solidify their knowledge of the consonant sounds while reading long vowel words.

Throughout the workbook, students write long vowel accent marks before reading the words to provide a visual understanding of the vowel sound. Examples of the long vowel accent mark in words are kite, gate, and leaf

With prompting and support, students will read words in the context of sentences that include both words they have already practiced and new words to decode.

The words in each lesson have been carefully chosen to allow students to practice their understanding of long vowel sounds in reading phrases, short stories, and a variety of activities, such as the Read and Draw and Identify the Drawing.

We have found an effective strategy to teach the workbook pages:   When the lesson is first presented, we teach the students how to complete the activities in a step-by-step process to prepare them to follow the same steps independently so that, in the next session, the students return to the second workbook page of each activity. In each lesson, students read either a worksheet with phrases or a short story.

For each lesson, we have made available a series of in-depth videos that answer the questions: what, why, how, what if, and what’s next.  Each video also includes an example of how we engage students and guide them to follow directions in a classroom setting.