Use this interactive PowerPoint with students who are at the beginning of their journey as readers. This bright, engaging phonics resource has been designed to explore students’ understanding of letter-sound relationships. The added bonus of this fantastic PowerPoint is that it includes audio!

The PowerPoint can be used with or without sound. Students are presented with a picture and three different short vowel sound options. If wanting to use the audio, students click on the sound button to hear the name of the object depicted. They focus on the vowel phoneme they can hear in that word, and then hover over the vowel sound options on the right. Students then click on the grapheme that matches the vowel sound in the word.

If students use the PowerPoint without the audio, they must first say the name of the object illustrated, before clicking on the matching grapheme. All objects are single-syllable words and a list of the objects included on the slides has been provided.

The focus of this activity is on listening to the sounds – as this is the essential first step in the process of learning to read.

Short Vowel Sound Practice for Kids

Have you found that kids confuse some short vowel sounds more easily than others? We’ve taken this into account and organised the slides into two sets:

• short ‘e’, ‘a’ and ‘i’
• short ‘a’, ‘u’ and ‘o’.

Do you teach students who have been reading for some time, yet continue to have reading difficulties? Do your students confuse vowel sounds? This quiz provides students with lots of repetition of the vowel sounds that can be difficult to differentiate.

Help your students develop their sound-symbol knowledge by using the PowerPoint as a whole class/small group or individual activity.

If you’re looking for other phonics resources, try one of these:

teaching resource

Mould It! Task Cards

A set of 28 playdough activity cards.

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Segmenting and Blending CVC Words Interactive PowerPoint

An interactive PowerPoint for students to practise reading CVC words.