<i> sound and <e>

It’s very common to mix those two sounds up. It seems like your son is not hearing the difference so continuing along the lines of hearing just won’t work. I’m sure some of the speech pathologists can give you more help but here’s what I do working from the Lindamood-Bell program if, after presenting the Vowel Circle, a child still is struggling with i/e.

You want him to be able to SEE and FEEL the difference. In LMB, we say there’s a tiny step between these sounds. Practice the following on your own first. Ask him to watch what happens when you say ee (long e sound) and you put your index finger up to your mouth. “Does my finger fit between my teeth at all?” The answer will be no because the teeth don’t open enough. Then say “i” - “Does any part of my finger fit inside?” He’ll say just the fingernail. If you don’t have fingernails, you can ask him if he thinks your fingernail would fit if you had one (my problem). At this point, you can tell him to think of this letter “i” as being a finger and the dot in the letter is your fingernail on the end. It’s a really good visual aid.

Have him practice “ee” and “i” so he can compare to be sure. Nothing fits inside your mouth with “ee” and only the fingernail with “i”. Now you move on to discriminate “i” with “e”. (In the Vowel Circle, the incremental differences are shown beautifully as your mouth opens gradually with each sound. What I’m expalining to you is just one little piece of it.) You can tell him that with “e”, your mouth will open a little more. Say “e”. What your son will notice is that the tip of your finger (not the whole finger) can go all the way into your mouth with “e”. Not just the nail anymore. Ask him to picture this letter “e” as a little mouth with a fingertip fitting right in this opening (show him your fingertip in your mouth again). Have him compare “i” and “e” several times himself, then “ee”, “i”, “e”. Practice this a little each day. It’s important that you not have him SAY the sounds as he’s feeling their differences - the feel is the most important. He’ll probably say them as he does this, don’t stop him but don’t pay attention to it either.

To summarize, with “ee” your mouth doesn’t open enough to let any part of your index finger inside, with “i”, just the fingernail, and with “e” the whole fingertip. This exercise provides a visual AND tactile aid for remembering these distinctions. It’s important to use your other senses when your auditory discrimination isn’t keen. I hope this helps. I’ve had good success with it myself. I’ll be interested to hear any other methods.

WE use the mouth positions, also, and write the letters on a textured surface with 2 fingers when she says them. One thing that has helped is to have HER think of something that will help her to remember the differences. She came up with something strange as far as the horizontal line of the mouth being longer, like a side ways i with /i/ (short i). And the short e /e/ we use a hand behind the ear like an old person trying to hear and say Eh? and at the same time use the sign language symble of the e behind that ear. We use the sign language letters sometimes, to reinforce, but a lot of the kids can’t do that, because it is another form of symbolism for the sounds, and that is one of the deficits.
And since SHE came up with the ideas (mostly (she thinks…have to use a little psychology) it sticks better. But it is in no way automatic all the time, and she doesn’t know she is saying (or writing) the wrong thing yet until I catch her and tell her to think about it. Then she can get it.
Good luck Connie

That is a great excercise I am going to try it with my son.

LMB is very good for this. You also want to practice having him “hear” the difference by giving him what we refer to as minimal pairs, words that sound the same except for one sound. So bet and bit would be an example using his difficult sounds. He tells you if they are the same or different when you say them (include an equal number of minimal pairs and pairs that ARE the same word). Not exciting but a few minutes of practice along with the above will help. Anything using more than one sense is actually good. Kids repsond well to writing letters in sand, shaving cream, in the air, with wicki sticks and etc…. Using word families to help with visual aspect will help too. For example bet, met, get are all in one family.

Very interesting I did not know this was a common thing. My son is often mixes them up. For example he spelled neck - nick, I thought he was just being careless. His spelling is poor but usually consists of having the correct letters just the wrong order such as gril for girl of friend firend. Thanks for the interesting bit of info.

What is the Vowel Circle? I have not heard of this. Is this something I can do at home with him. We are currently doing Reading Reflex, and he is doing well, except these vowels. Thank you so much for sharing what it know it really does help.

It isn’t rocket science. It just teaches us to be intimately aware of how you are using your mouth as you make the vowel sounds. It is hard to explain without pictures and actually showing you in person but the vowels are articulated from certain tongue positions in your mouth.

The front vowels are in the front of your mouth and those are ee as in meet, i as in hit, e as in get, long a as in gate, a as in apple,

then at the bottom of your vowel circle your tongue is totally relaxed and the sound u as in up is there

then we have the back vowels which are toward the back of your mouth, o as in hot, au as in august, aw as in awl. In CA there is very little difference between the pronunciation of o as in hot, au and aw.

The very back vowels are o as in toe, oo as in foot and oo as in boot. You will notice as you make your trip from the frontal portion of your mouth your lips are in a smiley position and as you get to the bottom of the vowel circle you lips are open and as you get to the back of the vowel circle your mouth is in the close position with the lips constricted and rounded.

these following vowels are diphthongs, on-glide and off glide or as LMB calls them sliders. You will notice with these “long vowel sounds” your mouth moves from one position to another. i as in ice, u as in use, ou as in out and ow as in owl, oi as in soil, oy as in boy.

Hope this helps you. If your child has a speech pathologist they should know this information. Teaching a child the vowel circle allows them to use their mouth to figure out what sounds are being changed as they are doing auditory processing exercises, help them with decoding of words and spelling as well.

The Vowel Circle is part of the Lindamood-Bell LIPS program. I understand it was developed from a speech/language perspective. It would be hard to explain it how to teach it in one post - you’d have to read that part of the manual or have someone show you. But basically the Vowel Circle is an ingenious way of representing nearly all the vowel sounds (but not /ay, ai/oa/ea), alone and in combinations, that exist in the English language. It puts them in a progression where the most important part is to understand how your mouth is working as you make each sound. The sounds are divided as follows:

ee/i/e/ae/a/u - called “Smiles” or “Smileys” because of the shape of our mouth when we make these sounds. The /ee/ is the most closed position of the Smileys and the /u/ is one’s mouth at its most open position of the Smileys. The next grouping is called “Open” and includes /o/aw, au. One’s bottom jaw is fully opened with these sounds. The last grouping in the actual circle are the “Round” sounds which are /oe/uu/oo. I can’t really show the middle /uu/ because we actually use a symbol not seen in English. It looks like two horseshoes put together and represents the vowel sound in the word /book/.

When you say the entire Vowel Circle, you have your hand placed under your chin. The student realizes, through a detailed initial lesson, that one’s mouth slowly opens incrementally from the beginning of the circle. The most open position would be /o/ and then the mouth slowly closes into a round position when it reaches /oo/. This REALLY helps students to feel the distinction between all those short vowel sounds that are so tricky.

That’s the basic circle. But included on the margins of the Vowel Circle are what’s known as Sliders and Crazy R’s. The Sliders are /ie/ue/oi,oy/ou,ow/. We call them sliders because our mouths slide from one position to another in order to make the vowel sound. The crazy r’s are: /er,ir,ur/ar/or. They’re “crazy” because the /r/ makes the vowel sound completely different from what you’d expect.

To me, the Vowel Circle is the hallmark of the LIPS program. It’s what kids get the most use out of and what I can refer them to when they’re struggling with decoding a word. I have my students lay out the Vowel Circle before they read to me. Eventually, they can just keep the blank circle sitting out as a visual jog, and they finally graduate to not needing it all. I can just say, “Remember the Vowel Circle” and that’s all the jog they need.

Thank everybody so much. I will try these things with my son. We live in the south it is even harder trying to distungish between the two sounds. I will try these methods and hope we have so luck.
Thank you to everybody who gave suggestions. This board is GREAT!