These Are The Vowels
Music Therapy vowel videos & songs for special needs individuals.
Goal 1: Client will verbally produce long and short vowel sounds.
Goal 2: Client will visually identify uppercase and lowercase vowels.
Domains: Speech, Academics
Vowels are phonemes produced without any appreciable constriction or blockage of airflow in the vocal tract. Vowel sounds differ from each other due to factors of tongue height, tongue advancement, lip rounding, and muscular tension. Vowels can be monophthongs, consisting of one sound, or diphthongs, consisting of two sounds. While the English language contains only 5 (sometimes 6) vowel letters, it has many more vowel sounds (depending on your source) between 11 to 14 monophthongs and 5 to 9 diphthongs. All of this is very confusing.
A simpler way to begin teaching vowel sounds is with long and short vowels.
Long vowels say their names:
A as in Able
E as in Even
I as in Idea
O as in Open
U as in Unit
 Short vowels (like consonants) have a name and a different corresponding sound:
A as in Add
E as in Every
I as in In
O as in Odd
U as in Under
Because every word contains a vowel, learning these letter sounds is a good step towards phonetically decoding words. And teaching kids that each vowel has a long and short sound is going to go much smoother than teaching them the International Phonetic Alphabet.
If your focus is speech, you will want to use both the long and short vowel videos. If your child needs help identifying letters you may stick with the long vowel video (as long vowel sounds are the letter names). And if you are working on reading skills, the short vowel sounds are the most common vowels in beginning level sight words.
Download includes:
- 4 videos [mp4 video files]
- These Are The Long Vowels
- These Are The Long Vowels (fill-in-the-blank)
- These Are The Short Vowels
- These Are The Short Vowels (fill-in-the-blank)
- 4 songs [mp3 audio files]
- These Are The Long Vowels
- These Are The Long Vowels (fill-in-the-blank)
- These Are The Short Vowels
- These Are The Short Vowels (fill-in-the-blank)
- 2 lyrics [PDF]
- These Are The Long Vowels
- These Are The Short Vowels
- 2 lyrics & chords [PDF]
- These Are The Long Vowels
- These Are The Short Vowels
- Â 2 pages of letter visuals [PDF]
- UPPER and lowercase
- UPPER or lowercase
