‘-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 […]
After the student has had some practice with the ‘-dge’ rule, we introduce a very similar rule. This is the ‘-tch’ rule, also called the “copycat rule.” Tutor: “The next blocker rule we are going to learn is very much like the ‘-dge’ rule you just learned. Today we are going to learn about spelling […]
As students develop their literacy skills, they will need to learn some expectancies to help them read and spell more challenging words. The first one we teach is the ‘dge’ rule, or Blocker D. The letter ‘j’ will never be the last letter in an English word. You don’t use a ‘brij’ to cross over […]
When you think of the letter ‘q’, what sound do you think of this letter making? Are you able to think of a word that doesn’t have a ‘u’ directly following the ‘q’? Pretty difficult, huh? Most words that exist in English with a ‘q’ and no ‘u’ are derived from Semitic languages and are […]
Let’s be honest: thinking of a letter borrowing something is pretty absurd. Especially when the thing it’s borrowing is another letter’s sound. This concept is even more strange for students who are just beginning to learn about the English language and how letters function on their own and within individual words. Pair that with affixes, […]
