Pumpkin Short Vowel Sounds Practice – FREE Printables!
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These FREE pumpkin-themed printables are great for short vowel sounds practice with CVC words. Kids “place the pumpkins” to build real and nonsense words, then write them on the recording sheet.
Why We Love It
No Prep, High Impact: Busy teachers love resources like this that require no prep but still deliver solid educational value. Just print and get started!
Phonics and Short Vowel Practice: By changing the middle vowel to create new words (both real and nonsense), students build critical phonemic awareness skills, strengthening their understanding of short vowel sounds in an engaging way.
Versatile Use: This kind of activity can be easily adapted for independent work, literacy centers, or small groups, giving teachers like you flexibility in how they use it in the classroom.
Multimodal Fun with Words: Building real and nonsense words with pumpkins encourages students to experiment with sounds in words.
They don’t even realize they’re practicing medial phoneme manipulation, which is an important phonological awareness skill!
How to Use It
- Cut Out: Cut out the 5 pumpkin short vowels. These will be used to complete words on the practice page.
- Optional: Glue the pumpkins onto popsicle sticks to make them easier to manipulate.
- Create Words: Create a word by placing any pumpkin vowel in a box between two consonants on the practice page.
- Read & Decide: Read the word out loud. Decide if it’s a real word or a nonsense word. Record the word in the correct column on your recording sheet.
- Switch Vowels: Swap in a different pumpkin vowel, read the new word, and notice how both the sound and meaning might change.
For example, “pot” could be changed to “pit,” which also changes its meaning! And a nonsense word like “sot” could be changed to “sit” (a real word).
Try different vowels to build lots of real and nonsense possibilities! Keep going until you’ve filled in all the spaces on the recording sheet.
More Fall Phonics Resources
- Fluency Turkey for ALL Phonics Skills
- Fall Roll & Write for Consonant Blends
- Thanksgiving Word Mapping Worksheets for 3, 4, and 5 phoneme words.
Download & Print
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👉 More Short Vowel Freebies: Printable word lists for short a, short e, short i, short o, and short u.