Story Spellers: Long Vowel Team - Full Length Stories

Do you ever wonder how to teach students when to use ai or ay or 'a consonant e' (a-e) when spelling words or how to differentiate between homophones while spelling, e.g., plain vs. plane? This book helps students who struggle with spelling confusing long vowel spelling patterns to learn spellings by associating focus words to a fun storyline.

Train Trip to the Bay follows Fay, a young girl who takes the train to meet her friend for a picnic by the bay. Fay is thrilled. She’s off on a train trip to the bay to meet her friend, Den the donkey, for a picnic. But the journey doesn’t go as planned. From a delay at the station and a sneaky quail on board to stormy weather along the way, challenges keep popping up. With quick thinking and friends on her side, the picnic goes ahead after all.

It is the first book in the Story Spellers Collection: Long Vowel Team Series. This engaging decodable story highlights 91 high-utility words that use the graphemes “ai” and “ay” to spell the long /ā/ sound. This book helps students who struggle to identify the correct spelling pattern, ‘ai’ or ‘ay’, for words with the long /ā/ sound by associating focus words with a fun storyline.

The text has been carefully written to ensure that words with the long /ā/ sound using spelling patterns other than ‘ai’ and ‘ay’, such as ‘a’, ‘a-e’, ‘ei’, ‘ey’, or ‘eigh’, are not included anywhere in the text. This helps avoid confusion while students become familiar with the focus words in the story. It is a simple and effective way to teach students who struggle with spelling to differentiate between homophones and choose the correct spelling patterns e.g., plain vs. plane, tray vs. trey.

The books in the Story Spellers collection have been developed to support orthographic mapping of focus words. Each book in the Long Vowel Team Series focuses on one or two related long-vowel team spellings and includes multiple target words spelled with the same pattern that school-aged learners will encounter when reading and spelling.

Students with learning difficulties who struggle to differentiate multiple spelling patterns for long vowels will benefit from this book. The intention is for children to associate the focus words with the story and subsequently become fluent in encoding and decoding those words.

Each book in this collection comes with educator resources to use alongside the story, reinforcing the spelling patterns covered. With lively illustrations, engaging animal characters, and high-utility words woven naturally into the tale, children practise focus words successfully, build fluency, and gain confidence as spellers.