Each day of the week, we do a different phonics game as part of our weekly phonics routine.

Interactive Practice GamesĪ portion of my interactive teaching slides for r-controlled vowels includes practice games to help students stay engaged during minilessons and apply their learning. These r-controlled vowel activities will help your students practice this phonics skill and learn to apply this knowledge to their own reading and writing. These posters are displayed in my classroom for students to refer back to.Īfter introducing the phonics rule at the start of my r-controlled vowels unit, we spend the week practicing with this skill through a simple daily phonics routine that incorporates a variety of activities. I use posters with visuals to help students remember the sounds that r-controlled vowels make, and I also include several different examples of r-controlled vowels on each poster. I explain the rule as the Bossy R rule, which always helps my students remember that the r “bosses” the vowel to make a new sound. When I teach my R-Controlled Vowels phonics unit, I explicitly teach the phonics rule to my students using a teaching PowerPoint. ur words: nurse, hurt, burst, turf, purse.or words: corn, horse, pork, story, north.ir words: bird, dirt, stir, firm, third.er words: germ, flower, spider, tiger, fern.This is because er, ir, and ur all make the same sound: /er/ as in her, dirt, and fur. While there are 5 r-controlled vowels, there are only 3 r-controlled vowel sounds to learn.

The r-controlled vowels include the ar, er, ir, or, and ur letter combinations.

You can see this in the words short, fork, corn, and torch. However, when o is followed directly by r, the sound it makes is not its typical short or long sound–it is an entirely new sound, controlled by the letter r. The resulting letter combination causes the vowel to make a different sound than typically expected.įor example, the letter o usually makes a short o sound (as in the word hop) or a long o sound (as in the word lone). Any vowel becomes an r-controlled vowel when it is directly followed by the letter r.

What is an r controlled vowel