Five of the twenty-six letters in the alphabet are especially important.  They are called vowels, and every word contains at least one of them.  The English language is built around the vowels.  The five basic vowels are:  a, e, i, o, u.  All of the other letters are called consonants.

Teach your student the five vowels.  When you ask, “What are the vowels?” he should promptly reply, “A, e, i , o , u.”  Drill this until the student knows this as well as he knows his own name.  Give him a page from a magazine or newspaper and ask him to circle all the vowels.  He should be able to do this even when he cannot read a single word on the page.

Because there are only five vowel letters but many more vowel sounds, each vowel makes a number of different sounds.  Learning when each vowel makes each of its different sounds can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  Right now, just concentrate on teaching your student the vowel sound given in the basic list in The Alphabet – Part II.  The other sounds will be addressed in future posts.