Long and Short Vowel Sound Sort

Shhhh… 🤫

Can you hear it?

It’s the sound of your students finally hearing the difference between long and short vowels! 

Each page of this hands-on reading activity focuses on long and short sounds for letters A, E, I, O, and U. 

Students play by identifying the words through their pictures and sorting them by whether the vowel sound is long or short. 

This activity is available as a cut-and-paste PDF worksheet, interactive Google Slides deck, and Google Jamboard activity.

Scaffolding + Extension Tips 

A team of dedicated, experienced educators created this resource for students to complete independently. You can also reinforce small group and full-class lesson learning in the following ways:  

👂Support Struggling Students

Help readers who have trouble with language acquisition by providing as-needed read-aloud assistance. Name each image and model decoding skills by isolating the sounds. Then focus on the long and short vowel sounds in each word heard. 

✏️ Challenge Fast Finishers 

Encourage students who quickly understand the concepts to spell and write the words they’ve designated by long and short vowel sounds. Once they’ve written the words, have students underline the long vowel sounds and circle the short vowel sounds. 

🔎 Go on a Vowels Hunt

Print, cut, and hide the picture cards around the room when your students are not around. Place the vowel sound mats in a central location and then set students loose to find the pictures. As soon as they find one, they bring it to its matching vowels sounds mat and place it under the long or short sound. NOTE: You may want to make a rule of only one student/pair per mat at a time. If not, things could get a little crazy! 🤪

Get our 10 Best Scaffolding Strategies here! 

Ways to Prepare This Resource for Your Students

Use the dropdown icon on the Download button to choose between the following format options:

• Google Slides 
• Color PDF 
• Black and white PDF 
• Google Jamboard 

Display this activity to your class using a digital whiteboard or share it in Google Classroom for virtual learning students. Students drag and drop the images into place. (Google Slides users must be in Edit mode to move the pieces, not Presentation mode.)

Print PDFs as cut-and-paste worksheets for students to complete as an English lesson warm-up or wrap-up, fast finisher activity or homework assignment.    

To create a reusable activity for your reading center, print on cardstock and cut out the pictures. Slip word mats into clear sleeves to protect them, and attach velcro to the pictures and mats. Students will move the pictures to the appropriate mat, holding them in place with the velcro.

Next: Fresh Phonics Teaching Strategies: Tips + Resources for the Classroom

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Make vowel identification part of your regular English Language Arts and Reading Lessons with these activities:

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