We can associate the long and short sounds with common spellings for the five major vowels. This is a Common Goal for Kindergarten. I am taking this to mean that our students need to know that sometimes vowels make a short sound in words and other times vowels make a long sound. I am assuming that common spellings would be CVC and CVCe words. I have been approaching this goal with Word Sort activities. The kids did great on sorting the words this week! READING the CVCe words was a little more challenging! I was very pleased with their reading of CVC words, though! Of course, we have been working on decoding CVC words since January and we only started CVCe words recently. Another fun project we did with this Word sort was create a paper umbrella and glue the words onto the bottom of the umbrella using paper raindrops. 
It took most of the week to do this project. One day they painted one side of the umbrella and the next day they painted the other side. Then they cut out raindrops using dark blue and light blue construction paper. I let them choose which color they wanted to use for the CVC words and which color they wanted to use for the CVCe words. They glued their words onto the raindrops and made sure that they had them sorted correctly. The CVC raindrops were glued on one side of the umbrella and the CVCe raindrops were glued on the other side. One of my kinder partners, Lea, said that another way to do this would be to make trees instead of umbrellas; so there is another idea! If you would like a copy of this activity, click on the product cover. It's a freebie!Have a wonderful weekend! We are hoping for rain here in Central Illinois! :)
