What is the Schwa? Now that students have learned about multiple syllable words and syllable division with a variety of endings, they will be introduced to the ‘schwa’. The schwa is a lightly pronounced unaccented vowel sound that sounds like /u/ rather than the vowel saying its name or sound, and the ‘schwa’ is represented […]
‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ Endings An inflectional ending is a group of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are very helpful for a developing reader to learn. The fourth and final inflectional ending we teach is the ‘er/est’ ending. These endings are added […]
‘-S/ES’ Endings The English language has a number of inflectional endings, which are groups of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are helpful for a developing reader to know. The third ending we teach is the ‘s/es’ ending, which is used to […]
‘-ING’ Endings The English language has a number of inflectional endings, which are groups of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are helpful for a developing reader to know. The second ending we teach is the ‘ing’ ending, which is used to […]
‘-ED’ Endings The English language has a number of inflectional endings- these endings are groups of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning, or more specifically, assign it a particular grammatical property. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are helpful for a developing reader to know. The first ending […]
Inflectional Endings An inflectional ending is a group of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are very helpful for a developing reader to learn. To learn these rules, we teach students to pay attention to the last letters of the base word. […]
Once students learn about multiple syllable words, how to break them down into individual syllables, and how open and closed syllables affect the word, they can then move on to learning about different endings that add an extra syllable. Before they jump into endings that change the tense of a word, they learn about a […]
After a student learns the basics about syllables based on auditory cues, they are ready to learn syllable division of written words. Multisyllable words can have a lot of letters, and we need a plan or strategy for figuring out what all those letters say. When we come to an unknown multisyllable word, we can […]
To finish up the ‘blockers’ rules, we teach students about the double ff, ll, ss rule (sometimes referred to as the ‘Floss Rule’). Rather than adding a different consonant to block the vowel, we double the end consonant, and, strangely, for only the letters ‘l’, ‘f’, and ‘s’. Any word that has a short vowel […]
Now that students have a general understanding of blocking rules, we introduce them to a couple more variations of that concept by continuing with the -ck expectancy. The -ck rule functions the exact same as blocker -dge and copycat -tch but is just a different sound after the vowel. To ‘protect’ the vowel with a […]
