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!

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.

Present Continuous Reading Texts

Teaching English to young students, I do my best to offer kids interesting texts for reading. Kids do not need to be bored during English classes as boring teaching materials are bad for memorizing stuff. I try to incorporate reading into every topic we learn including grammar. I’ve always experienced problems with finding child-appealing texts for grammar topics. The recent classes dedicated to the present continuous tense (aka present progressive) showed that I badly needed a decent story with simple sentences containing this grammar structure to read with my students. So I decided to adapt one of my reading comprehension sets for my present continuous classes.

BUY THE PRESENT CONTINUOUS READING SET IN A PRINTER-READY PDF FILE


PREVIEW

Word Families Worksheets: At Words (Free PDF)

I’ve recently started to design printable word families worksheets for my English teaching practice. Looking at 154 word family flashcards I created last year, I understand that it’s going to be a really long work. It’s hard to even predict how much time it will take to design worksheets for all the word families featured in the flashcards. So I decided to publish the worksheets as soon as I design them and give them away to my fellow teachers for free. So you are welcome to download a free PDF file in this and all my future blog posts dedicated to this series of printable word families worksheets and activities. My first post features the at word family worksheets. They are good for learning simple short a words in elementary school and even kindergarten. I hope these child-appealing printables will prove to be useful for your English lessons.

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Sight Words Worksheets

I have designed a bunch of printable sight words worksheets and activities to help kindergarten kids and elementary students build their first English vocabulary and acquire basic reading skills. There are more than 80 printable worksheets, more than 500 flash cards and a small reading comprehension kit in my sight words arsenal based on Dolch words. I’d like to share some of these printables with my fellow EFL and ESL teachers.

Word Families - 154 Printable Flashcards

I have designed 154 printable flashcards featuring word families. Originally I created a small bunch of such cards with most common word families to teach my little son to read in English. My son has been learning English as a foreign language since childhood so, when he was a toddler, I started to design printable reading cards incorporating lists of words with a common ending (up to 12 words on each flashcard) and up to 9 pictures representing some of the words. The rhyming words made it easier for my son to start reading in English while observing and getting used to the spelling patterns of English words. The bright pictures helped me draw his attention to the cards and let him memorize some useful words thus expanding his vocabulary.

BUY ALL WORD FAMILY FLASHCARDS IN A PRINTER-READY PDF FILE.

Preview flashcards

Later I decided to use the word family flashcards for my English classes with young students. The kids seemed to love the picture cards, and over time I made even more flashcards for my EFL teaching practice. At the moment my printable word family set counts 154 cards. There are more than 870 words illustrated with child-appealing pictures incorporated on the flashcards.

ab word family flashcard

CVC Words Flashcards

CVC words are perfect for my elementary school students who started learning English just a few months ago. These short words are easy to memorize, so they are the instant passive vocabulary for non-native speaking kids I teach English to. That is why, when teaching basic English reading rules with CVC words, I do my best to help children memorize those words. I design my printable teaching materials accordingly: with a lot of pictures and word-to-picture matching tasks. I have recently designed a set of printable CVC words flashcards to make learning CVC words even more fun for my young students.

BUY THE CVC WORDS KIT IN PRINTER-READY PDF FILES
The kit includes 116 flashcards, 5 charts and 15 matching worksheets

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There are 116 printable flashcards designed to visualize CVC words for elementary ESL and EFL students and thus stimulate their memory in order to expand their English vocabulary from the very outset. Each card has a picture and a word part. The word part can be cut out to be used for word-to-picture matching activities.

Printable CVC flashcards featuring short a sound words.

Reading Comprehension Worksheets: Food and Cooking

Food and cooking are popular topics for English classes at school. That’s why I keep on designing printables dedicated to these topics to make my classes more fun and engaging for my students in elementary and middle school. If you follow my blog, you might know that I have created a large printable kit that includes worksheets, flashcards and games dedicated to food. I have recently decided to add some reading comprehension passages and related worksheets to my collection of ESL/EFL resources designed to help children learn and expand the food and cooking vocabulary.

BUY THE WHOLE READING COMPREHENSION SET IN HI-RES PRINTER-FRIENDLY PDF DOCUMENTS
The set includes 3 reading comprehension passages with worksheets as well as a collection of more than 100 printable flashcards dedicated to food, cutlery and tableware

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The food and cooking reading comprehension set includes three passages and related worksheets that offer activities that ask students to answer questions, match words and pictures, fill in tables and crosswords etc. The passages tell about cooking, making cakes and the story about a lion who loved eating fruits and vegetables rather than smaller animals.

The reading comprehension passage telling about cooking food.

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.

English Worksheets and Other Printables for Grade 1

A big part of my students are elementary school kids. That is why I have designed a good number of printable English teaching materials for my 1st grade students. The printables include flashcards, posters, awards, worksheets, games, coloring pages etc. Many of them have already been published in my blog. In this blog post, I’d like to show some of those printables that I use for grade 1 to help my fellow EFL and ESL teachers find my earlier publications and see the bigger picture of what I create for my classes and what I can offer for their classes as well.

I have designed a lot of printable worksheets, charts, flashcards etc for my grade 1 students.

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.

Beginning Consonant Blends and Digraphs Worksheets

Following the blog post about my beginning blends and digraphs charts, I’d like to share a few printable worksheets I designed to teach beginning consonant blends and digraphs to my young students.

BUY THE SET OF CHARTS, POSTERS AND WORKSHEETS IN HI-RES PDF FORMAT

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A printable worksheet designed to teach digraphs ch, ph, th, wh, sh, kn. 

Beginning Consonant Blends and Digraphs: Charts and Posters

Learning blends and digraphs is an important part of developing English reading skills. Teachers should pay a lot of attention to these frequently occurring letter patterns as the ability to quickly recognize them is the key factor to reading fluency. When working with struggling readers or kids in the early stages of learning to read in English, a teacher needs to spend many hours with them practicing reading relevant words and pronouncing blends and digraphs sounds. Such monotonous activities may get boring for children pretty quickly. That is why I do my best to use bright visuals and picture-based worksheets to get young students’ attention and maintain their interest as long as possible. And I’d like to share some printable charts and posters I have designed to make my lessons dedicated to consonant blends and digraphs more visually appealing to kids.

BUY THE SET OF CHARTS, POSTERS AND WORKSHEETS IN HI-RES PDF FORMAT

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I’m a big advocate of visual aids for young students learning foreign languages. I design a lot of own printable visuals for my English classes. I have recently designed a number of bright picture-based charts, posters and a few worksheets for my lessons dedicated to beginning consonant blends and digraphs. In this post I’d like to publish the charts and the posters. I’ll share the worksheets in one of the upcoming blog posts. I hope my fellow EFL and ESL teachers will find these resources useful too.

Beginning Consonant Blends and Digraphs Charts

CVC Words Worksheets: Short O Sound

This is the fourth blog post sharing my collection of printable CVC worksheets that I designed to teach preschool and elementary school students to read basic English words. The matching worksheets feature pictures that not only help kids develop reading skills but also better memorize their first English vocabulary. This blog post offers CVC worksheets featuring the short O sound.

BUY THE CVC WORDS KIT IN PRINTER-READY PDF FILES
The kit includes 116 flashcards, 5 charts and 15 matching worksheets

BUY CVC CHARTS AND WORKSHEETS ONLY
Worksheets for short a, e, i, o, u sounds.

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CVC Words Worksheets: Short A Sound

Reading CVC words is one of the first activities that educators offer children when teaching them how to sound out English words. Those consonant-vowel-consonant words are short and simple and therefore they are great for helping kids learn to read letters and pronounce sounds correctly. The CVC words are so simple that some parents use them to teach their children basic literacy from as early as four years old. And of course teachers offer a lot of CVC words activities to preschool, pre-k, kindergarten students. As an EFL teacher I use all sorts of CVC worksheets, games and other activities when teaching elementary school kids.

BUY THE CVC WORDS KIT IN PRINTER-READY PDF FILES
The kit includes 116 flashcards, 5 charts and 15 matching worksheets

BUY CVC CHARTS AND WORKSHEETS ONLY
Worksheets for short a, e, i, o, u sounds.

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Most CVC words activities suggest reading the words aloud to pronounce consonant and short vowel sounds. If there is a mistake, a teacher or other students help the reader. Anytime we read the words though, kids start asking whether these are real words and what they mean. I seems that sometimes they got frustrated with dealing with so many words which meaning they don’t know. So I’ve got this idea that I could design printable CVC words worksheets featuring pictures of some words. Thus my students could read the words and build their basic vocabulary from the very outset of studying English.

You may also like:
Short a phonics cards.
Reading comprehension worksheets: short word stories

So I’ve designed a few worksheets that include a list CVC words that can be illustrated with pictures and word-to-picture matching activities. Today, my students can read CVC words, understand their meaning and build their vocabulary by memorizing some simple words through matching worksheets. Kids love more visual CVC worksheets and they are more eager to read words with accompanying pictures.

Reading Comprehension Worksheets: Drago the Dragonfly

This is another reading comprehension worksheet that belongs to my reading comprehension kit. The short reading passage is about a dragonfly named Drago:

Drago is a blue dragonfly. He has big transparent wings and loves to fly. He lives near a pond. His wings are strong, so Drago can fly very fast and far from his home. Drago has mosquitoes for dinner.

BUY THE WHOLE READING COMPREHENSION KIT IN PRINTER-READY PDF FILES

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Reading Comprehension Worksheets: Short Word Stories

I shared some of my animal-related reading comprehension worksheets on social networks, and my fellow EFL and ESL teachers found them rather interesting. So I’d like to demonstrate another type of reading comprehension passages that I use for my English classes.

BUY ALL READING COMPREHENSION WORKSHEETS IN HI-RES PRINTER-READY PDF FILES

I love this trick when I ask early readers to read a relatively long and seemingly intimidating English text, and they suddenly realize they can easily read it and understand most of it. Their reaction is always very positive and they feel proud of their reading accomplishments. So I write these reading comprehension passages consisting only of short words (mostly three-letter words and a few four-letter words). I often use these passages with my elementary school students (first and second grade) as well as with older kids who struggle to learn English as a foreign language.

I have written six short-word reading comprehension passages so far. I call them short word stories. And I have recently decided to add some tasks and questions to the stories to turn simple texts into colorful printable worksheets that would be more appealing to elementary school children. Such reading comprehension worksheets definitely bring more fun to the classroom and encourage kids to further develop their English reading fluency.

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So I have designed some printable worksheets that incorporate the following reading comprehension passages:

• My Dad Is a Vet [78 words]
• My Dad and My Pal Are Eating a Pie [88 words] (I use this one to teach the present continuous tense)
• Can I Get a Pet? [88 words]
• A Van for My Big Dog [115 words]
• Can I Own a Van? [145 words]
• An Ant Bit My Toe [291 words] (this one is good for teaching different meanings of the verb “get”)

I’d like to share a few reading comprehension worksheets based on my short word stories. So here they are:

Reading comprehension passage "My Dad Is a Vet".

Reading Comprehension Worksheets: Daphne the Dolphin

Here is another reading comprehension worksheet that belongs to my large reading comprehension kit. This one features a dolphin named Daphne. The reading passage goes as follows:

Daphne is a dolphin. She lives in the ocean and she is very smart. Daphne and her friends love to jump in and out of the water! She likes to click, chirp and whistle when she is happy. Daphne eats a lot of small fish every day.

BUY THE WHOLE READING COMPREHENSION KIT IN PRINTER-READY PDF FILES

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Here are the worksheets.

Reading Comprehension Kit. Animal Passages. Grades 1-3

At last, I have completed this massive set of printable reading comprehension worksheets and accompanying flashcards that I designed to improve reading skills of my elementary school students and help them expand their animals vocabulary. I was taught to create large sets of visually attractive printable EFL and ESL materials by the strong competition among English teachers in my city. Being a modest private English tutor, I have to compete with businesses that employ multiple EFL teachers for large groups of students. They have much bigger advertising budgets and opportunities than I do. Therefore offering the best and the brightest teaching materials is my tried and true way to attract students and their parents who eventually hire me to teach English to their kids. The new reading comprehension kit is this special kind of printables I can proudly use for my classes and make kids fall in love with learning English.

BUY THE WHOLE READING COMPREHENSION KIT IN PRINTER-READY PDF FILES

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Yes, I use reading comprehension worksheets that I can get on the Internet. They are somewhat good for children who start learning to read in English. But eventually kids get bored with them. Those worksheets seem to be too bland for today’s children who are accustomed to more vibrant content they can freely access online. So I decided to make my own experimental reading comprehension worksheets with more colors and less straightforward tasks. I used more vibrant and funny images along with some questions that require a little bit of thinking beyond what is written in the comprehension passages.

I did my best to make my reading comprehension worksheets visually appealing to kids.

Phonics Flashcards (Consonants S, T)

Today I would like to present another group of English consonant flashcards. The post contains 23 more cards dedicated to the letter Ss and 1 card with the letter Tt.

BUY ALL MY PHONICS CARDS IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY PDF FORMAT (vowel and consonant sounds)

Buy vowel sound flashcards only

Buy consonant sound flashcards only

Ss: cards №№77-78 include words with the sound [s] at the beginning and the end of the words as well as when it occurs due to the double ss. Card №79 contains words where the letter S produces the sound [s] at the endings after voiceless consonants. Cards №№80-81 present words in which S gives the sound [z] when it occurs between two vowels and in the endings after vowels and voiced consonants. Card №82 offers words in which the letter S is pronounced as [ʃ]. Cards №№83-92 contain the blends sc, sk, sl, sm, sn, sp, st, sw, sh. Cards №№93-96 present the three letter blends spl, scr, spr, str. Card №97 presents the phonogram -sion which gives the sound [ʒn] while card №98 presents the same phonogram -sion which gives the sound [ʃn]. Card №99 includes words with the silent S.

Phonics consonants flashcards