Provide students with pictures of several familiar objects that contain long vowel sounds, such as a bike, cape, Jeep, bone and flute. Make sure there are a few pictures with each vowel sound. Ask children to name the picture and then sort the pictures into groups based on the vowel sounds they hear in the word pictured. You can also find an interactive computer game in which students sort pictures by their vowel sound on Sadlier-Oxford's student activity center.
Give your students a detailed picture with several objects on the page. Make sure that your picture includes several objects with the vowel sound you want students to practice. Ask them to color only the objects in the picture that contain a given vowel sound. For example, if you are learning about the long "a" sound, they could color a cape, a lake, a chair or a plane. Starfall has picture hunt games in which children read a word and find and click on that object in a detailed picture.
Prepare several cards that picture objects with a long vowel sound and write the word underneath each picture, leaving out the vowel letter. For example, if the card pictures a rake, you would write "r_ke." Students will choose a card and determine which vowel letter is missing to complete the word and use letter tiles to fill in the blank. An interactive version of this game can be found on the "Soft Schools" website.
As students learn about the many different ways that long vowels are spelled, they can sort words into categories based on the spelling of the vowel sound. For example, the long "a" sound can be spelled "ai," "ay" or with an "a" and a silent "e" at the end of a word. Give students a list of words containing several different spellings of the long vowel sounds you want them to practice. Ask them to cut apart the words and sort them into piles based on their vowel spellings. They must then read each word aloud.