Knowing short and long vowels is a decoding prerequisite.

Music and auditory association are amazingly effective for teaching students to produce and identify the difficult short vowel phonemes. These fun explicit phoneme songs and great posters make it easy to master these sounds. The guide includes black-line masters for student songbooks.

Students must identify vowel phonemes in the 7 sets of 20-card vowel sorts. Five cover the short and long phonemes for each vowel and two require that students discriminate between 2 short vowels.

There are also 3 sheets of 30 pictures (6 for each short vowel) with color-coordinated sound cards. Guide tells how to use these for yarn yokes, sorts, or game activities.