First Grade · Reading · week 24

A Vowel-Team Story

Read a short decodable story built from vowel-team words, with growing accuracy and smoothness.

You know a lot of vowel teams now. Time to put them all together in a story. Sound out any new word slowly, then reread the whole story to make it smooth.

Watch for ai, ay, ee, ea, oa, igh, and y as you read -- they are all over this story, doing their long-vowel job.

📋 For the teacher
Teach it (10–15 min):
  • Read the story once slowly for accuracy, then once more for speed and smoothness.
  • Ask your child to point out a few vowel-team words after reading, just for fun, not as a quiz.
  • Talk through what happened in the story in order, so meaning stays connected to decoding.
  • Praise fluent phrases, reading three or four words together smoothly, as a step up from word-by-word reading.
Talk about it:
  • What happened first, next, and last in the story?
  • Which vowel team showed up the most in this story?
  • Did your reading feel smoother on the second try?

Mastery looks like: They read a vowel-team story with good accuracy and increasing smoothness, and can retell the events.

Common stumbles: Slowing all the way back down to sound out familiar vowel-team words instead of reading them automatically.

See it visually

Interactive, spoken-aloud tools that show this idea in motion.

Blending & SegmentingSlide sounds together to read a word — /s/ /u/ /n/ → “sun”.try →
Homework for this lessonType it, write it with a stylus, or print it for pencil & paper.open →
Records attendance + 15 min of Reading for this learner.
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