Making Sense of Vowels & Teams

Finally! Anyone can understand how to read English vowels! We have 20 vowel sounds but only 6 vowel letters, so we reuse letters or use letter teams to represent some sounds. There are also multiple ways to represent most vowel sounds. Whether you are a native English speaker or an English language learner, it is very difficult to figure it all out, and much of it isn’t taught in schools. It’s no wonder so many English-speaking children never learn to read well. We’ve organized the 53 vowel spellings in a way that makes it clear! We show you all of the options and provide you information to help you choose the correct sound when you read. We clearly show you which letters work together as a team and which letters provide information about other letters nearby. Practice reading words organized by sound or by spelling. Touch the screen to hear confusing letters and to check if you read a word correctly.

You might have been taught that the letter A says /a/ like in “cat” and /ae/ like in “apron”, but “what about all” of the other words like “what”, “about”, and “all”? You might know that the letters OR represent the sound combination /or/ like in “for” and “fork”, but what about in “actor” and “word”? How do you know when OR represents /or/ and when it is /er/? This app makes sense of English vowels so you don’t have to figure it all out. We show you the patterns and let you practice reading words with each pattern and option. You will learn to see which letter or letter team represents each sound. If you are a teacher or tutor, this will help you help your students. The English code is messy, but it's not chaos. This app can help you understand the full English code beyond the alphabet. It's an amazing resource for English learners, struggling older readers, and reading instructors.

There is more complexity within the consonants of English and word endings. We've made an app for that, plus fun apps for young children who are learning to read.

No in-app purchases or subscriptions.