Lesson 2 - Vowels

Let's get to know the Vowels.

Aa Ee Ii Oo Uu

The rest of the letters in the alphabet are called Consonants. The vowels may have "long" or "short" sounds. Now, this is a tutorial so I'm going to make it easy as I can, without using those complicated symbols. The long sounds of the vowels are pronounced same as its name.

Aa	long a	/ey/	gate, bake, whale, tape
	short a	/a/	bat, map, sack, ran
Ee	long e	/i/	meet, heat, receive
	short e	/e/	wet, yes, test
Ii	long i	/ai/	kite, like, microphone
	short i	/ I /	sit, till, Tim
Oo	long o	/o/	hole, bowl, core
	short o	/ah/	rock, log, mop
Uu	long u	/u/	muse, united, tune
	short u	/uh/	sun, bus, must

You may have noticed that most of the vowels with long sounds are spelled with another vowel following it. For example:

Ee: "meet", "heat", "receive". You can see "ee", "ea", and "ei".

Oo: "tour", "door", "loaf". This time, the combinations are "ou", "oo", "oa".

For short vowel sounds, one important thing to remember about them is that it is usually followed by a single consonant letter or 2 consonants. For example:

car --> r is a single consonant so "a" has a short sound.

mist --> st are 2 consonants so "i" has a short sound.

mice --> ce are 1 consonant and 1 vowel so it is pronounced as m-ai-s with a long i sound.

Try to determine whether the following words have long or short vowel sounds. Careful, they can be tricky. While you're already studying the words below, open the dictionary and know the meaning of each word.

1. tie

2. wise

3. mother

4. wander

5. melt

6. hour

7. love

8. stair

9. while

10. water