Push your lips into a round O. Start with your mouth open, then close your lips into a smaller, tighter circle as you finish — /oʊ/, the name of the letter o.
Check yourself: Mirror: your lips must get SMALLER and rounder while you say it. If your lips hold still, you are saying a plain o.
Watch for: A plain held /o/. All three home languages have one, which is why this sound gets waved through and then turns up wrong in every long-o word for the rest of the year.
◆ marks a word that does NOT follow today's pattern — Blumenfeld boxes these on the page. Teach it by heart; do not let the class sound it out and lose faith in the rule.
Say the word, have them repeat it, count the sounds on fingers, THEN write. The count is what stops a child writing the first letter and guessing the rest.