Looking for a way to get some extra practice in for students who need to work on whether the word says tap or tape, fin or fine? Try this deck of cards with short a, a-silent-e, short i, and i-silent-e words.
Use this card deck for extra silent-e and short vowel practice.
Here are some suggested activities:
Card Sort – pull out just the short-a and a-silent-e cards, mix them up, and have the student sort them into two piles according to vowel sound, saying the vowel sound, then reading the word as they sort each card. When they have finished sorting, read all the short-a words, and then all the a-silent-e words. Repeat for short-i and i-silent-e cards.
Show and Say – you can do this with just the short-a/a-silent-e cards, the short-i/i-silent-e cards, or mix them all in. Show your student a card and have them say the word. If they get it correct, they keep the card. If they get it incorrect (or say it both ways fishing for the right answer) it goes back in the stack.
Uno Game – and finally, by far the favorite way to practice with these cards is to use the card deck to play “Uno”. The four vowel sounds (short-a, a-silent-e, short-i and i-silent-e) are equivalent to the colors in Uno. The beginning sounds (printed in blue), are equivalent to the numbers. You can match either by vowel sound, or by beginning sound. The practice part of this is that you must announce how the sound (not letters) on the card you’re playing matches (“the /br/ in brick matches the /br/ in brave.” Note that the entire beginning sound must match, so the b in bath would not match the br in brave.)
Download the deck here: short and silent-e card deck
ps. If you haven’t seen the post on using the one-finger/two-finger kinesthetic prompts for the vowel sounds, check it out here: kinesthetic-silent-e-practice. This technique would be helpful to use on the cards too to support students in getting to the correct vowel sound.