When teaching your child how to pronounce letters of the English alphabet, it may get confusing for your child as many letters don’t make a consistent sound. The sounds become different in different words. The way to ensure that your child understands how to pronounce these letters in any given word, is to teach them conceptually about how the pronunciations change.
Here, we introduce the concept of R controlled vowels for preschoolers. You may have noticed that in words when R follows a vowel, the pronunciation of that vowel becomes different. So how and where to use which pronunciation? Read on to understand.
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What Is An R Controlled Vowel?
An ‘R Controlled’ vowel is a vowel that is immediately followed by the letter ‘r’. So, in a word, when any of the letters ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ or ‘u’ is followed by r, we can call it an R controlled vowel. In these words, the vowel can no longer be pronounced as a long or short vowel, and its sound becomes dominant by the presence of R. Thus, the ‘r’ in this case is often known as a ‘bossy R’.
R Controlled Vowel Sounds
Notice the pronunciation of the vowels in the following : er, ir, and ur. All of them make the same vowel sound, for instance in the words her, sir, and fur.
Now, look at some words with ar and or. They give more than one sound.
For instance, ‘Ar’ is pronounced differently in car, beggar and arrow. Or is also pronounced differently in thorn and doctor. The changes in the vowel sound due to the presence of R next to it makes it an R controlled vowel sound.
Representation Of R Controlled Vowel
- Ar – The /ar/ sound has just one representation, as R dominates the pronunciation
- Er – The er representation is pronounced as /er/ in most cases, except in some where it may take on an /uh/ sound. However, this pronunciation can easily be confused with some ir or or representation.
- Ur – The ur representation is similar to er, pronounced as /er/ in the word. There aren’t any specific rules as to which representation is to be used for which word. Thus, children need to be familiarised with these words by reading more and more.
- Ir – This is another representation of the /er/ sound. It can at times be confusing due to homonyms, like fur and fir, or sur and sir.
- Or – This might be the trickiest representation. Stand alone, the word Or has a different pronunciation compared to the or sound in words like worm and doctor, where it changes the O sound to er.
There are also some complex representations like ‘oor’, ‘eer’ or ‘ear’ that have unique sounds. The three-letter representations of R Controlled Vowels sounds /er/ and /or/ are more complex than the two-letter representations. They are much less common too.
R Controlled Vowels: Teaching Techniques
R Controlled Vowels must be explicitly and systematically taught to children when they are learning phonics to ensure that they learn to identify the correct way to spell and pronounce tricky letter-combinations and words. Let us help you make teaching the numerous representations easier and give your child the required practice.
1. Introduction of “ar”
- Use a ‘Compare and Contrast’ Strategy.
Have your child read CVC words containing short ‘a’, for example: ‘can’, ‘cat’, ‘cab’, and ‘cap’. Tell the child that the consonant ‘r’ changes the sound of the vowel immediately before it and read the word ‘car’ for them. Repeat the process with other CVC words, asking them to read the word with ‘ar’.
- The Sound Substitution Strategy
Have the kid read ‘cat’ then replace the ‘a’ with ‘ar’ and read ‘cart’. Have them read ‘had’ then replace the ‘a’ with ‘ar’ and read ‘hard’. Repeat the process until they understand this concept.
An R Controlled Syllable is one of 6 types of syllables. Have the child read two-syllable words with ‘ar’ in the first syllable only. e.g. ‘ar-my’, ‘par-ty’, ‘car-go’. When counting the number of sounds in a word, ‘ar’ counts as just one sound, /ar/. You can help your child remember this by using sound buttons for sound counting.
Once your child can read ‘ar’ words, you can move on to the spelling of these words. A common spelling error of beginning spellers is writing the letter ‘r’ by itself for /ar/. This is a confusion of letter name and sound. Explicitly teach them that the letter name for ‘r’ is pronounced as /ar/ but this is not the sound it represents. The sound that the letter ‘r’ represents is similar to the sound of a puppy barking, /r/, as in ‘red’ and ‘run’. Remind the students of the mnemonic ‘R in charge’ – the letter ‘r’ must be in charge of a vowel when representing /ar/, so when writing /ar/ the vowel ‘a’ must precede the ‘r’.
2. Introduction of “er”
The second most frequently heard R Controlled Vowel sound is /er/. It has quite a few representations. Knowing the frequency of each representation can help your child make an educated guess regarding the correct choice of representation, as there are no rules guiding choice in one-syllable words. Introduce ‘er’, ‘ur’, and ‘ir’ together initially but make the ‘er’ representation your first focus so that the child can build confidence using the most common representation.
3. Introduction of “or”
The letters ‘or’ can be used to represent both /er/ and /or/, for example:
Children are used to seeing these letters as the word ‘or’ so it is easier for them to learn the connection with /or/ than the connection with /er/. Based on the philosophy to make learning as easy as possible for children, you should teach ‘or’ as /or/ first, using the activities already provided. The ‘or’ spelling of /er/ is predominantly used after a ‘w’ in a one-syllable word. Students have two rules to learn in connection with the ‘wor’ spelling:
- When ‘w’ comes before ‘o’ in a syllable, it changes the vowel sound to short /u/ as in ‘wonder’.
- The ‘r’ in words like ‘word’, ‘worm’, and ‘worth’ changes that short/u/ sound to /er/. Watch for student confusion with the irregular word ‘were’.
‘W’ as the Wizard W, as it can change the usual representation of /u/ to ‘o’ and the usual representation of /or/ to ‘ar’. It makes sense to teach ‘wor’ and ‘war’ in the same lesson as both are under the control of both ‘r’ and ‘w’.
The ‘or’ combination can also be used to represent /er/ in the second or third syllable of a word, as in ‘doc-tor’ or ‘dec-or-ate’.
Activities For The R Controlled Vowels
1. Word Maker
Get some scrabble tiles and separate the ‘r’ tiles, vowels and consonants. Keep the consonants inside an opaque bag. Now, hand your child 5 tiles, one of each vowel and an R tile. Ask them to draw a consonant from the bag, and see if they are able to make any word out the tiles in hand, using a vowel and R adjacently. For instance, For, Sir, Fur, Her, Car.
2. Mix It Up!
Give your child a small word with an R controlled vowel. Ask them if they can replace the vowel with another to make a new sensible word. For instance, far, fir, for, fur; or star, stir; or warm, worm.
3. Sounds Similar
Prepare of worksheet with two columns. Write a few words with R controlled vowels, and another column left blank. Ask your child to fill in the blanks with any word of their choice that sounds similar or rhymes with the first.
Eg – You can give them the word bird, and they can write next to it ‘word’ or ‘herd’.
4. Spot The Bossy R
Give your child a paragraph to read and ask them to highlight words that have R controlled vowels. This is an activity you can conduct anytime, because all you need is a printed passage, like from an old book, and a highlight or pencil. It will help improve your child’s focus and observation and will make them notice how different words have a variety of sounds.
5. String Letter Beads
Give your child some beads with letters written on them, along with a lace or string. Now, give them a word with an R controlled vowel and let them look for the correct letters and string it on the bead within one minute. Make this a competitive game by using a stopwatch to see who finishes first! Giving a physical form to words helps in visualising the words and remembering their pronunciations more effectively.
6. Picture Match Race
Play this game on a lawn. On the ground mark the starting and finishing line. Oh the finishing line, place cards on the ground with the letters ‘ar’ ‘er’ ‘ir’ ‘or’ and ‘ur’ printed in bold. In a bucket, keep a few picture cards of words with R controlled vowels like car, nurse, bird, etc. Keep this bucket at the starting line of the race. Now ask your child to draw out a picture card from the bucket and run to the finish line and place the picture card next to the correct vowel card. You can give your child a 5 minutes to relay as many cards as they can, or make it a competitive game among a few kids to see who finishes first. The first child to get the maximum number of cards correct wins the race!
7. Yahoo!
This is a fun game that the entire family can play together. It requires focus and great attention power. Print out a small paragraph with many r controlled vowel sound words. Pass the printed sheet around as each person reads one word. If the word you get is an R controlled vowel, you must follow it up by saying Yahoo! For instance, your passage can read as such:
“Harley is a little girl. She has a purple shirt and skirt. Her mom works in a large firm.”
List of R Controlled Words For Kindergarteners
Let us look at some words where your child needs to apply the R controlled vowel rules for pronunciations and spelling:
1-Syllable Words
- AR words: Car, bar, far, part, hard, start, arm, jar, dark, farm, Mark, star, yard, spark, yarn.
- ER words: Her, verb, herd, perm, fern, term, Bert, perch, germ, clerk, jerk, stern, per, serve, nerve.
- IR Words: Bird, girl, first, third, sir, shirt, dirt, birth, firm, stir, skirt, whirl, thirst, twirl, flirt.
- OR Words: Corn, for, or, born, north, horse, torn, short, shorty, sort, storm, force, horn, form, york.
- UR Words: Nurse, turn, fur, hurt, church, purse, burst, burn, curve, curb, urge, curl, surf, blur, burnt.
2+ Syllable Words
- AR words: Target, market, harbor, carbon, party, cargo, artist, partner, garbage, Marvin, carpet, farmer, army, pardon, carnival.
- ER words: Butter, otter, sister, ever, copper, person, herself, perfect, observe, determine, Jersey, concern, expert, desert, servant.
- IR Words: Birthday, circus, dirty, thirteen, thirsty, swirling, girlfriend, confirm, virtual, thirty, affirm, birdcage, skirmish, squirting, circle.
- OR Words: Forest, order, corner, story, forty, morning, orbit, orange, scornful, Florida, support, accord, normal, report, afford.
- UR Words: Turkey, purple, turtle, return, further, furniture, occur, disturb, murmur, purpose, Thursday, nursery, burden, current, burger.
With these fun activities and practice words, we hope your child has got clarity on what are the r controlled vowel syllables and how their pronunciation changes when R dominates the syllable. Remember, that for most rules there are exceptions. Your child may come across some words where the pronunciation of R doesn’t change, like in words where R is part of the next syllable eg. Barrel (try comparing it with the sound of bar) or coral (try comparing it to cordial). But with lots of reading and writing practice, your child will master the skill in no time.
Also Read:
Pronouns in English for Kids
Singular and Plural Nouns for Children
How to Teach Vowels and Consonants to Prechoolers
