In this first OpenWayEnglish lesson, we start with the long ‘o’ vowel sound. Here, students can practice blending this vowel with various consonants. They also get used to the fact that the long ‘o’ vowel can be spelled in many different ways, for example: go, know, load, and sew. In ‘new’, the ‘ew’ is pronounced very differently.
Another example is: ‘bow’, as in ‘bow tie’, and ‘bow’, as in ‘take a bow’. The ‘o’ sound in bow tie is totally different from the ‘o’ in ‘take a bow’. Due to these many spelling inconsistencies, early readers can easily become discouraged learning new words. But by assigning a specific color to each vowel sound and certain consonant sounds, the students do not focus on the spelling, but on the color, and thus can read any word. Learning how to spell the words comes from writing and repetitive cognition.
Here are a series of slideshows and a PDF workbook to get started.
Enjoy!
Lesson One Videos
Lesson One – Part 1
OpenWayEnglish slideshows present the vocabulary in conjunction with each workbook lesson. The YouTube links each have an audio file of a narrator saying the words aloud. With the aid of a parent or teacher monitoring the process of watching the visual materials, and doing the exercises in the workbooks, students learn to recognize the target vowel sound while simultaneously learning the consonants.
After viewing the slide shows, children can reinforce what they’ve learned by doing the corresponding exercises in the workbook, either in class or as homework.
At the end of the printed lesson, are ‘Go Fish’ cards that can be printed (in color, if possible, with thick paper). Playing ‘Go Fish’ is a fun way to practice reading the words themselves in a game context (a way to learn basic conversational English, especially for second language learners). The instructions for playing ‘Go Fish’ are in workbook Lesson 1. The cards can also be used as a matching memory game, or as flash cards.
Successive lessons will cover different vowel sounds, each with its own distinct color, as well as more consonant combinations. You will notice that colors are sometimes used for consonants as well to help signal their sounds (the same color is used for f and ph, soft g and j, or the light shading of silent letters).
Lesson One – Part 2
Here, a student is pronouncing the vocabulary. The target is for students to get the vowel sound right. Learning to blend the consonants surrounding the vowel sound takes practice. So, in this clip, sometimes the student doesn’t always get the final ‘n’ sound quite right, but that’s OK. As students progress through the vowels, they learn to recognize all of the consonants and will eventually pronounce them correctly.
Lesson One – Part 3
In this next slideshow, more vocabulary with the target vowel, long o, is introduced. Some of the words here are longer, such as “clothes”, having 7 letters, but with only the one vowel sound. The consonants ‘c’, ‘l’, and ‘s’ (which has a ‘z’ sound in this word so it has the ‘z’ color) are the only necessary sounds, combined with the long ‘o’ vowel, to properly pronounce ‘clothes’. “Clothes” can be colorized in two ways. One way is to only color the ‘o’, to indicate that here ‘o’ is the long ‘o’ sound, with the ‘t-h-e’, between the ‘o’ and the ‘s’, colored a silent letter grey. Or, as “clothes” is colorized in the first case, ‘o’, ‘t’, ‘h’, and ‘e’ are all colored with the long ‘o’ color. However, the pronunciation is the same in both cases. The world is colorized in several ways to help students understand that they can read by using the color, regardless of how the words are spelled.
Lesson One – Consonant Practice – Part 1
In this slideshow, the images will help students more easily understand and practice connecting consonants and the vowel/sound.
Lesson One – Consonant Practice – Part 2
Here is a very short exercise for more consonant practice, an extension of the previous video clip.
Lesson One – Story Time
In this section, students learn to read connected words in simple text.
Workbook
Here are exercises to practice from the Lesson One workbook: Workbook Lesson One