Vowel definition for kids

What are vowels and consonants?

We explain what vowels and consonants are and how primary-school children are taught to identify CVC, CCVC and CVCC words, vowel digraphs and consonant digraphs.

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What are vowels and consonants?

The alphabet is made up of 26 letters, 5 of which are vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and the rest of which are consonants.

A vowel is a sound that is made by allowing breath to flow out of the mouth, without closing any part of the mouth or throat.

A consonant is a sound that is made by blocking air from flowing out of the mouth with the teeth, tongue, lips or palate ('b' is made by putting your lips together, 'l' is made by touching your palate with your tongue).

The letter 'y' makes a consonant sound when at the beginning of a word ('yacht', 'yellow') but a vowel sound when at the end of a word ('sunny', 'baby').
 

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Vowels and consonants in primary school

Children learn all the letters of the alphabet in the Foundation Stage (nursery and Reception years). This means they learn to look at a letter and then make its sound, but also to hear the sound of a letter and be able to write it down.

In Reception children move onto learning to read and write CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant) such as cat, top, hit, nap.

They then move on to read and write CCVC words such as trip, stop, pram.

They also learn CVCC words such as milk, lamp, tusk.

Children will also learn that sometimes two vowels are put together to make one sound, such as ai, oo, ea, ie which can be found in words such as r ain, boot, read and pie. When two vowels are put together to make one sound, this is called a vowel digraph.

They also learn that sometimes two consonants are put together to make one sound, such as th, ch and sh which can be found in words such as bath, chip and mash. When two consonants are put together to make one sound, this is called a consonant digraph.

Teachers may or may not make children aware of all the linguistic vocabulary in bold above. It is not necessarily important that they know these words or can define them: the most important thing is that they learn to read and write individual letters and words with confidence through thorough step-by-step phonics activities.

Children moving up the school may notice certain things about vowels and consonants. For example, in English we rarely have three or more vowels together; beautiful, queue, liaise, quail, quiet, squeal are some of the few words that use this spelling pattern.

Another thing children may notice is that every word in the English language contains a vowel. This is quite a useful thing to know when playing hangman: go for the vowels first!

More like this

• What are CVC words, CCVC words and CVCC words?

• Phonics teaching step-by-step

• What is a digraph?

• Recognising short vowels in CVC words (Phase 2 phonics)

• What is ‘magic e’ or a split digraph?

• Reading vowels (Phase 2 phonics)

• Two-letter vowel sounds: /ee/ /oo/ /ur/ (Phase 3 phonics)

• Joining vowels: handwriting practice activity

• Using unstressed vowel words

Vowel Facts for Kids

A vowel is a particular kind of speech sound made by changing the shape of the upper vocal tract, or the area in the mouth above the tongue. In English it is important to know that there is a difference between a vowel sound and a [letter] in the [alphabet]. In English there are five vowel letters in the alphabet.

The sounds of English are written with letters in the English alphabet, as either vowels or consonants. All English words are written with vowel letters in them.

These letters are vowels in English:

A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

It is said that Y is "sometimes" a vowel, because the letter Y represents both vowel and consonant sounds. In the words cry, sky, fly, my and why, letter Y represents the vowel sound /aɪ/. In words like myth and synchronize, Y represents the vowel sound /ɪ/. In words like only, quickly, and folly, Y represents the vowel sound /i/.

It can also be a consonant sound called a glide as in the beginning of these words: yellow, yacht, yam, yesterday. Y is a consonant about 2.5% of the time, and a vowel about 97.5% of the time.

The letter W can sometimes be the second part of a vowel sound as in words like such as cow, bow, or how. In these words the vowel has the sound of /aʊ/. The letter W can be used as a consonant sound at the beginning of in the words when, where, wet. In some languages, like Welsh, the letter W represents the vowel sound /ʊ/, like cwm (a kind of valley).

In written English the six vowel letters are used to represent the 13-15 vowel sounds (depending on the variety) in English. This means there are many more vowel sounds than letters in the English alphabet, and the English spelling systems doesn't always help us figure out what the English sounds are. This can be confusing.

• The rest of the letters of the alphabet are consonants:

B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, Y (sometimes), and Z.

Monophthongs and diphthongs

Simple vowels are called monophthongs. The letters, like /ɪ/, are the IPA letters for each vowel sound in English. (The IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet). In the IPA, each symbol represents a different sound, so using the IPA is helpful in pronouncing words.

Common monophthongs in English (these are for General American English) include:

• /i/ as in police, feet, eat, and silly
• /ɪ/ as in it, sit, kick, myth and bitter
• /ɛ/ as in end, bet, less, and letter
• /æ/ as in at, apple, fat, and matter
• /u/ as in cool, tune, soup, and kung fu,
• /ʊ/ as in cook, should, pudding, foot, and rook
• /ʌ/ as in bus, blood, come, and up
• /ə/ as in kingdom, photography, philosophy, ketchup, and hundred
• /ɚ/ as in butter, collar, flavor, firm, and burst
• /ɔ/ as in all, fought, hot, and bot
• /ɑ/ as in father, walk, arm, heart, wasp, lager, envelope and aardvark

Diphthongs are a combination of two different vowel sounds, one vowel sounds turns into another sound as you say them. If you pronounce the words below slowly, you can hear the two vowel sounds of the diphthongs.

Common diphthongs in English include:

• /eɪ/ as in ate, reign, vain, flavor, slay, and convey
• /oʊ/ as in toe, row, go, boat, mode, and chateau
• /aɪ/ as in eye, I, pie, cry, cypher, climb, lime, light, kayak, Thai, and height
• /aʊ/ as in loud, house, cow, about, Daoism, and Macau
• /oɪ/ as in boy, moist, and Freud

Like other languages, there are many dialects of English, and different dialects often use different vowel sounds. But the IPA symbols can tell us which vowel sound a dialects uses. For example, some American English speakers differentiate between the vowels in the words cot and caught, while in other dialects these words are homophones. People who study the differences between the dialects of English often study the different way vowel sounds are pronounced.

The difference between the way English is spelled and the way the words are pronounced came about because all languages change, so spoken English changes, but the spelling system does not.

The study of speech sounds is called phonetics.

Related pages

• Orthography
• Dialect
• Diphthong

Images for kids

All content from Kiddle encyclopedia articles (including the article images and facts) can be freely used under Attribution-ShareAlike license, unless stated otherwise. Cite this article:

Vowel Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.

How to explain to a child the difference between vowels and consonants?. Blog Logo-Expert

Elementary school teachers notice that phonetic analysis for toddlers is one of the most difficult tasks. Indeed, in order to determine what sound is in front of you, the child needs to analyze it properly and remember how vowels and consonants are pronounced. Without a clear understanding of the difference, the child will be constantly confused.

To help your baby learn to distinguish sounds, follow these guidelines:

Inventive children will show you how to sing the sound Z or M, and then confusion will not be avoided. The fact is that all sounds in our language can be divided into 3 groups: vowels are voice, voiced consonants are voice and noise, deaf consonants are only noise. Sonorants are closest to vowels: p, l, n, m, d. Therefore, the argument that vowels are sung and sonorants are not - do not use for the sake of your own further peace of mind.

The main conclusion he must come to is that when pronouncing consonants, air is constantly being prevented from easily jumping out of the mouth: either teeth, or lips, and the sound M generally comes out through the nose. Give the baby a mirror - let him compare how the mouth behaves when he pronounces vowels and consonants in turn.

• Tell a story: “Mouth is a house that has doors, a floor, and a ceiling. The vowel sounds lived happily and cheerfully in this house - they could easily run out into the street for a walk and no one interfered with them.

Say all the vowels - show that the mouth is really open, the tongue is calm, and the air comes out unhindered. “But once an evil snake settled in this house and did not let out sounds on the street. Either he will press them from the side, then he will close his teeth. Say the consonants. “But the consonant sounds were smart and they came up with how to outwit a snake. They began to hold on to the handles with vowel sounds and together run past the snake. Try". The child should notice that when pronouncing open syllables, the air comes out freely. “So, since then, sounds began to live together and the snake was not afraid. ”

Note that individual consonants are read briefly, but together with vowels they can be drawn for quite a long time.

Prepare cards with pictures and words: ball, house, cheese, whale, meadow, forest. These words contain all vowel sounds. Put the first card in front of the child and make a riddle: "This word has an unusual sound that you can shout the loudest, sing it the longest, when you pronounce it, neither your teeth, nor your lips, nor your tongue interfere." Give the child the opportunity to shout out the sound and look at himself in the mirror. Be sure the kid will find the answer!

And if you want to learn how to distribute the stages of corrective work to form the correct sound pronunciation, master the production of sounds with the help of speech therapy probes; learn how to activate kinesthetic sensations in the oral area and how to use the V-Zibe massager; then we are waiting for you at the mini-course: "Sound production: features of the beginning of work and the formation of sound pronunciation. "

Vowel sounds and letters. How many are there in Russian?

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The correct pronunciation of words is one of the components of beautiful and literate speech. To achieve this, you will first have to study the sounds themselves. In this article, we will figure out together what vowel sounds are, how many vowels are in the alphabet of the Russian language, and what sounds they can represent.

What are vowels and sounds

Vowel sounds are those sounds that we freely convey with our voice. This is where their name comes from:0039 voice means "voice". When pronouncing, air exits through the mouth and does not create noise, and the position of the tongue and lips determines which vowel sound we will pronounce.

There are much fewer vowels in Russian than consonants. There are 6 of them in total: [a], [o], [i], [s], [y] and [e]. To understand whether a vowel sound is in front of you or not, try to sing it. For example:

• a-a-a ,

• woo

• s-s-s .

If it works, then the sound is a vowel. You can't do that with consonants.

There are more vowels than sounds - there are 10 of them: a, i, u, u, o, e, e, e, i, s . This difference is due to the fact that some of these letters can represent two sounds and are pronounced using a combination of a vowel and a consonant [y']. For example, in the word spruce , the letter e expresses two sounds - [y '] and [e]. Let's look at the table all the vowel sounds and the letters that represent them.

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How vowel sounds are related to syllables

Vowel sounds form syllables - sound segments of words that we pronounce with one breath. One syllable can be either a vowel with one or more consonants, or a vowel alone. There is even a rule by which syllables can be counted: how many vowels in a word - so many syllables.

For example, in the word journey there are 5 vowels: [u], [i], [e], [i] and [e]. This means that it has 5 syllables: p-te-she-stv-e .

Test yourself!

Count the number of syllables in the words: try on, tanner, well-groomed, care, prefix, capital, wet, invitation, orange .

Vowel sounds and stress

Now let's see what groups vowel sounds are divided into. Sometimes their pronunciation depends on whether the stress falls on them, that is, whether we single them out with our voice. So vowel sounds are divided into stressed and unstressed. Here are some examples:

Stress in Russian can fall on any of the existing vowel sounds. However, only 4 of them can be unstressed - these are [a], [i], [y] and [s]. In this position, we pronounce sounds weaker than under stress, because of which they can change qualities and sound differently.

Interestingly, the vowels [o] and [e] can only be stressed. There are only a couple of exceptions to this rule: for example, in words cocoa and canoe sounds [o] and [e] in an unstressed position.

How unstressed vowels are related to consonants

How an unstressed vowel sounds depends on the consonant that precedes it. Or rather, from its hardness or softness. If it is a hard consonant, it can be followed by unstressed vowels [y], [a] and [s]. When we talk about a soft consonant, it is followed by unstressed vowels [y] and [and].

Test yourself

It's time to find out if you now understand well what vowel sounds are in Russian. To do this, we have prepared tasks for self-examination.

Task 1

List all the vowels in these words:

Task 2

Name 5 words each in which the sounds [a], [i], [y] and [s] would be stressed.

Task 3

Name 5 words in which an unstressed vowel would come after a hard consonant, and 5 more words where it would follow a soft consonant.

Task 4

Count the number of syllables in the words below (don't forget to use the rule you learned at the beginning of the article!):

• weightless,

• sunrise,

• adventure,

• painter,

• perpetuate,

• pleasant,

• image,

• category,

• exciting,

• melting,

• snowflake.

The rules of phonetics help us to speak correctly, so it is important to master the topic of vowels well and avoid gaps in knowledge.

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