IE Vowel Team Reading Passage, Words Chart and Worksheets (Free PDF)

Welcome back to my ongoing project dedicated to helping young English learners explore the wonderful world of vowel teams through engaging stories, fun worksheets, and illustrated vocabulary charts! If you're new here, I'm an ESL/EFL teacher and content creator sharing my printable materials to support fellow educators around the world.

This is the third blog post in my phonics series, and today’s spotlight is on the vowel team “IE”. Just like in my previous posts on the “EA” and “OO” vowel combinations, I’ve created a complete printable pack filled with illustrated charts, matching and labeling worksheets, and an original reading passage – this time about two friends visiting a bakery... and a mischievous magpie!

OO Vowel Team Reading Passage, Words Chart and Worksheets (Free PDF)

I'm excited to continue sharing free educational resources from my growing English phonics project dedicated to helping young learners master vowel and consonant letter combinations. This project is designed specifically with ESL and EFL students in mind, combining vocabulary-building and phonics practice with highly visual, engaging materials. Each set in the series includes a reading passage, a word chart, and several printable phonics worksheets, all carefully crafted to make learning fun and effective.

EA Vowel Team Reading Passage, Words Chart and Worksheets (Free PDF)

Welcome to my new English phonics project! This series is designed to help English learners master the sounds and spelling patterns of key vowel and consonant letter combinations, with a special focus on building vocabulary. Whether you’re an ESL or EFL teacher, a parent, or a learner yourself, you’ll find these resources invaluable for teaching and practicing phonics skills.

Vowel Teams - Printable Posters

The concept of two or more letters spelling a single sound (digraphs, trigraphs and quadgraphs) or two sounds coming together to create a new sound (diphthongs) can be confusing for young non-native English speakers. I teach English to kids whose native language does not have diphthongs, and digraphs are rare things for this language. Yet in English digraphs and diphthongs are very common, so kids must learn how to spell them correctly. When working with elementary school students, I call digraphs and diphthongs vowel teams and consonant teams. I help kids imagine letters being pals and working together to form sounds. Imagining letters as cartoon characters allowed me to create all sorts of activities and icebreakers in the classroom. I also design visuals to help students better memorize common letter teams and sounds they make. Printable posters featuring vowel teams and consonant teams are among my best visual teaching materials for digraphs and diphthongs.

BUY ALL 30 POSTERS IN HI-RES PRINTER-READY PDF FILES.

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I’m a big fan of visuals for teaching English. I believe such materials are very much conducive to memory of preschool and elementary school children. Even when we get aquainted with English phonics and learn how to spell letters, I do my best to offer as many relevant visuals as possible for kids to memorize new vocabulary through associating words with pictures. Such association is natural for children. Reading lists of words to train spelling of various digraphs is not as good as reading lists of words with pictures around them to train spelling and memorize some useful vocabulary at the same time. That is why I love the concept of printable visually-enhanced posters featuring words and corresponding images for students to different spelling patterns involving vowel teams and consonant teams. I have designed 30 such posters so far.

Vowel teams posters printed on A3 paper sheets (297 x 420 mm, 11.7 x 16.5 inch).

Silent Letters in English - Charts with Words and Pictures

Silent letters are a very interesting phenomenon in English language. I teach English to non-native speaking kids whose native language does not have letters that are not pronounced. Therefore all too often my young students find it very weird that they need not read certain letters in English words. They struggle really hard to get accustomed to these unusual and confusing spelling rules. So I decided to pay special attention to silent letters in English when I was designing my printable poster-sized phonics charts. I’ve created multiple charts featuring words with silent letters or letter combinations along with relevant pictures in order to make those charts child-appealing. The charts feature nouns that can be easily illustrated.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MY PRINTABLE PHONETICS CHARTS

I’m sure there are multiple languages in the world that do not have such thing as silent letters (e.g. Spanish and many Slavic languages). I hope my printable charts will help my fellow EFL and ESL teachers introduce silent letters in a visually appealing way to novice English learners speaking these languages.

A printable chart listing English words with silent letters a, b, c, d.

Phonics Charts - Printable Posters

I have already pointed out in one of my earlier blog posts dedicated to phonics charts that studying English phonetics can be overwhelming and boring for kids. There is very little fun in learning which sound an English letter or combination of letters produces. ESL and EFL teachers know very well how difficult English pronunciation can be for non-native speaking children. Unlike singing songs, playing games and reading stories, phonics make young students get tired of English classes very quickly. In order to make learning English phonetics less challenging for my elementary school students, I have designed quite a few colorful child-appealing phonics charts and flashcards that I use in my classroom to develop kids’ phonemic awareness in a more or less fun way.

English phonics posters on my classroom wall.

Phonics Sounds Charts - Digraphs, Diphthongs, Letter Combinations

English is far from being an easy language when it comes to reading and spelling rules. So many inexplicable exceptions make even native speakers’ heads spin, let alone kids who begin learning English as a foreign or second language. So learning common phonics patterns is crucial but being aware of exceptions to reading rules is also important for teaching kids how to pronounce and write English words correctly. Sometimes the best way to teach English reading and spelling skills is to let young students read words with some tricky phonics patterns such as digraphs, diphthongs and other letter combinations. The more they see and read such words the better they memorize how these and similar words are pronounced. This is how so-called sight words are taught to elementary students. And this is why I have designed a set of printable phonics sounds charts for kids to read and memorize tricky spelling patterns and their correlation with pronunciation. I also use these phonics charts as an illustration of how crazy English language can be when the same letter combination is pronounced differently in different words sometimes without any reason.