

Put this video on three times a week and watch the magic happen. I know there are a lot of reading shows on PBS Kids and so forth, but none can touch Letter Factory in terms of helping kids memorize the sounds of the letters. The letters all say their sounds–including the vowels–and your kids can learn the song to memorize them. In Letter Factory, Leap the frog and his family travel to a factory where letters are made. I am all for hands-on, parent-child learning, but this 35-minute cartoon is a reading goldmine. Sets that have the vowels in a different color will help your little learner group these special letters together.

The best way to teach letters is to start with three-dimensional, tactile letters that a child can touch and feel. You can start this very early–and it creates a “memory peg” to make formally learning the vowels much easier later on. When you teach this song to your child, skip the random “e, i, e, i, o” and swap it out for the names of the vowels “a, e, i, o, u.” One easy way to teach the vowels is by changing the words to “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” (Don’t worry, Mr. Here are some tips and tricks on how to teach vowels to preschoolers. This article contains affiliate links to things that you might like. You can hardly give your child a linguistic definition and expect her to know her vowels…so where do you start? You do need to adjust the shape of your mouth to make different vowel sounds–but more on that later. Linguists would say they require no friction–you don’t need to use your tongue, teeth, or lips to produce the sound. Vowels come from the Latin word vox meaning “voice” because they are the sounds you produce strictly from running air over your vocal cords.
