How many times have you heard or uttered the phrase: “<a, e, i, o, u> & sometimes <y>”? Countless times I imagine.

Several of my elementary groups recently finished a quick holiday Vowel Hand wreath project by tracing their hand, writing each of the vowels on the fingers and a <y> on the palm of the Vowel Hand. This project was inspired by a post from Rebecca Loveless in the Structured Word Inquiry Facebook Group. She had posted a picture of a teacher’s Vowel Hand Wreath with that particular phrase written on it. Interestingly, she noted in her comments that it really should say “…most of the time <y>” to which several people agreed, including me.

When I showed the picture to my students so they could see what we were going to make with our cut-outs, they knew immediately that we would change the saying to “most of the time <y>” because we have said this dozens of times by this point in the year. A couple of students were curious about the use of two different phrases. They had seen plenty of examples of <y> functioning as a vowel far more often than they’d seen examples of <y> as a consonant. They wondered why anyone would say “sometimes <y>” when it was clear in our work, that it simply wasn’t the most logical choice. After discussing that sayings tend to sound catchy (they agreed that “sometimes <y> rolled off the tongue a bit better than “most of the time <y>) and that people tend to follow what they read in books or hear in their university classes or professional development. This saying has been around for decades, so we decided that people just went with it, didn’t think about questioning it. However, the students felt there was a more informative way to convey the job of <y> in our language.

They wanted to know if there was a way to find out how often a <y> is a vowel and how often it is a consonant so they could tell people that there might be a really good reason for making the saying, “…most of the time <y>”. We opened up the Word Searcher by Neil Ramsden (linked here) and used the codes he has written that help us search for the letter <y> in specific positions within words. The students knew that a <y> positioned initially in a word is functioning as a consonant and that if it is medial or final in a word, it is functioning as a vowel. Of the tens of thousands of words in this word bank, we found only 188 words with an initial <y>.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We then used a special code for locating medial and final positions from the menu choices, deleting the initial position code and adding the final position code (placing this in the Search Pattern:  .y.|y$) and found 7,534 words with a vowel <y>! Wow, what a difference! A few of the small words were not words we knew but since this site is in the U.K. and covers all English speaking countries, we assumed there were regional words. Additionally, there were some words that were the same but had different spellings (<-ise/<-ize> suffixes, etc.>) but decided that no matter the spelling, they are both words in someone’s English speaking country. Besides, there were so few that with the large difference between the two types, it would not sway the results.

 

 

 

 

 

RESULTS:  The students did the math and found that <y> functions 7,346 times more often as a vowel than as a consonant. That was a surprising number!

Even though we were comfortable with the knowledge that it was more frequently a vowel, we hadn’t felt it until we saw that number. I copy/pasted the list into a word doc and show the students that <y> as a consonant took up 1 page while <y> as a vowel took up 36 pages. I showed them how to figure out the percentages and they wanted to make that visible for our bulletin board.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I gave the students colored index cards to write down examples of words that fit each of the vowel letters; for <a-u> we focused on lax (short) and tense (long) vowels only for this project and for the <y>, we focused on the vowel phonemes / iː / (silly), / ɪ / (gym), and / aɪ / (try). They made a short list of words with an initial <y> to represent the small number of consonant words.

 

 

My 3rd grade group wrote letters or a skit to ask others if they would consider changing the saying to “most of the time <y>” so we added a voting section to our bulletin board.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We made a video of the skit (news-style) and sent it to all the teachers asking them to show it to their students then vote YES or NO on the bulletin board outside of my classroom. Both of the girls’ parents approved the video to share publicly and one of them is a teacher as well and plans to show it to her students and have them vote, too.

 

We are thinking that perhaps other schools around the country might watch the video and join in on the vote, too.

With this week heading into a holiday, this might be a challenge to fit in or a welcome 5-minute distraction.

If your students vote, please complete this quick google form: We will track the city/state/province/country on a map where votes come from.

We will keep the survey open through January 2024 in hopes to see participation from around the world! Check back here to see the results.