Short u – Book 4 of 5
This book in the Short Vowels Series continues to inspire a love for reading and motivate a deeper understanding of the English language. Self-confidence grows as learners master phonics skills, acquire more sophisticated vocabulary, and comprehend more complex texts. Short u presents interactive lessons with vibrant graphics and silly poems. Readers are phonetically challenged as they create short u word families and learn new sight words. The engaging stories, Grades 4-6 reading levels, range from comical to factual. Many words from Short a – Book 1, Short i – Book 2, and Short o – Book 3 are purposely integrated for reading practice and mastery. Readers who complete Book 4 will demonstrate reading fluency in decoding and word recognition, both critical for the comprehension of written text. Comprehension skills for making inferences and drawing conclusions continue to be reinforced with practice. Short u eases readers into deeper thinking with evaluating the author’s purpose or suggestions, followed by judging the meaning of the text and making an opinion about its importance.
Student Edition
Make Words
Each lesson begins with readers matching and writing a variety of beginning sounds (onsets) with common short u vowel pattern endings (rimes) as they determine if the sounds are words. This interactive phonics routine motivates learners to break down words into the smallest units of sounds, discover predictable spelling patterns in rhyming families, and form as many words as they can. This activity helps readers decode the sounds in unfamiliar words when they recognize familiar word patterns and transfer those phonetic sounds. Readers become increasingly familiar with the short u sounds in words, as well as become more fluent in pronouncing and spelling more words accurately.
Goofy Poems
After making word families, learners read four poems with words from Make Words along with new sight words found in a dotted box. Instantly recognizing sight words without guessing or sounding them out better ensures reading fluency. The poems are amusing, yet they provide needed practice in reading the lesson’s new words. Additional rhyming words not listed in Make Words are underlined in the poems to help the reader recognize vowel group analogies, transfer their phonetic sounds, and experience reading additional family words with ease and success.
Story
After learning new sight words in a dotted box, readers will enjoy the stories that range from amusing narratives to true stories about animals, science, history, and real-life facts. As learners read the stories, they become increasingly familiar with short u word families and more sophisticated multi-syllable sight words. This offers practice and reinforcement opportunities to learn additional inflected endings, prefixes and suffixes, contractions, compound words, abbreviations, cardinal and ordinal numbers, dates, idioms, and word symbols. With the help of funny tales and interesting true stories, readers progress through Grades 4-6 reading levels as they gain more knowledge of phonics skills, widen their vocabulary knowledge, and successfully strengthen their comprehension skills with self-confidence.
Question & Answer
After every poem and story, readers participate in various types of activities. Activities and question formats include true & false, multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank, and matching. Short answer responses promote sentence structure and unity which, in turn, reinforce structure and coherence in reading sentences. Some activities and questions reinforce literal comprehension skills of recalling details, sequencing, and understanding new vocabulary. Readers have self-confidence in answering literal-based questions that have all answers stated in the text. Other activities and questions require deeper comprehension for making inferences, drawing conclusions, and making predictions. Additional skills in this activity section include using references, alphabetizing, using context clues, classifying, understanding idiom meanings, and spelling. Readers experience active involvement with the text as they encode words and effectively articulate their thoughts.
Draw a Picture
After completing the Question & Answer story section, a picture box with directions on what to draw presents a fun but essential activity. Readers create mind pictures as they read, visualizing scenes, characters, themes, or details from the story. Picture box directions also inspire imagination and originality. Through artistic interpretation of their mind pictures, learners strengthen their understanding of the content.
Compound Words
An enrichment skill activity is recognizing compound words and drawing a line between the two words. When two smaller words are combined, the new compound word has a new different meaning! This recognition encourages learners to independently and creatively combine two nouns to form a new compound word. Compound words enhance a reader’s vocabulary expansion and language proficiency that are required when reading and spelling multi-syllable words.
Identifying Antonyms
The last enrichment activity is the matching of opposite words. Knowledge of antonyms helps to develop critical thinking skills, improve comprehension, and expand the reader’s range of vocabulary. Drawing a line from one word to its opposite enhances learners by building background knowledge, determining word associations, discovering multiple word meanings, and reinforcing spelling.
Teacher Edition
In addition to the Short u – Book 4 for the student, the Teacher Edition book includes:
- Answers to questions and activities in each lesson, written in red for easy recognition
- Phonics and Decoding Skills listed in specific detail for each lesson
- Reading Comprehension Skills listed for each question in the poems and stories
- Quick Reference Guide to help quickly target specific areas of attention
This edition provides the reading instructor with a carefully designed, systematic, and true phonics-based curriculum.
Answers
The Short u Teacher Edition, identical to the student’s copy, provides easy to read answers in red print for all questions and activities in each lesson. Measuring and evaluating a student’s progress in acquiring reading, vocabulary, and spelling skills are simplified by the program format. The various activity sections facilitate the skill identification of a reader’s strengths and weaknesses. Multiple critical thinking choices, motivating ideas, and creative suggestions are provided in the lesson activities for teachers so that learners of all ages, attention spans, and backgrounds will be inspired and succeed as they Really Learn To Read!
Phonics and Decoding Skills
The Phonics and Decoding Skills section provides teachers with a simple, convenient, detailed list of all reading, vocabulary, and other literacy skills presented in each lesson: short u word family endings, beginning sounds, inflected endings, prefixes and suffixes, contractions, compound words, abbreviations, cardinal and ordinal numbers, dates, idioms, word symbols, short u word families, and sight words. This condensed format gives teachers the advantage of easily reviewing each lesson’s skills to readily determine the reading, vocabulary, and other literacy abilities the learner has mastered or that require additional practice for reading success.
Reading Comprehension Skills
The Reading Comprehension Skills section is a valuable reference tool that allows teachers to trace each question and activity within a lesson back to its skill objective. Objectives include vocabulary, critical thinking, drawing conclusions, making inferences, predicting outcomes, using context clues, classifying, understanding idiom meanings, and spelling. This table format conveniently allows teachers to monitor the categories of comprehension skills that are developing, needing practice, or becoming strengthened as the reader progresses through Short u – Book 4 and, subsequently, through Book 5 in the Short vowel series.
Quick Reference Guide
The Quick Reference Guide provides teachers with the prompt identification of skills presented in each lesson. A review of the condensed skill categories includes phonetic rimes and their onsets, inflections, prefixes and suffixes, contractions, compounds, abbreviations, dates and numbers, idioms, and word symbols. Accurate assessment of literacy progress is essential and practical in this chart format.
Order PDF Version
Each book is available individually, or as a set with the other books in the series. The PDF format allows teachers to tailor lessons to their students’ needs by printing specific sections at a time. You’ll be impressed by the progress learners make while having fun mastering the English language.
