This will be the word you cue your students with when they are not sure how to spell a word with the long e sound.įor example, use the word tree for long e spelled ee, meat for long e spelled ea, chief for long e spelled ie, and baby for long e spelled y. This will still require you cueing them but at least you’re not providing the answer without them thinking about it.ĭecide on a guide word for each spelling pattern. Use guide words to help students decide on the spelling pattern. Since they all sound the same and can appear in the same place, choosing the right spelling pattern can be tricky. It’s much easier to learn how to read these than to learn how to spell. Teach one spelling pattern at a time, and once one is mastered you can add in another. When you start teaching long e, you really have to focus on repeated exposure, lots of practice, and homophones. The ei spelling of long e is the least common. The long e sound spelled ey is usually at the end of a base word. Examples include brief, relief, and rookie. It’s usually in the middle of the word but can be at the end. The long e sound spelled ie is often preceded and followed by consonants. These are the least common ways to spell the long e sound. It also makes the long e sound when it comes before another vowel, as in the word embryo. This spelling of long e is actually the most common. Y usually spells the long e sound at the end of a word when it follows a consonant and the word has more than one syllable. Some teachers also group them as wet/meal words (ea) and nature words (ee). Then when your students ask which spelling to use for a long e word, you can say ‘/ee/ like tree/meat’. So you would introduce ee with the word tree, and ea with the word meat. One trick is to use a guide word with each spelling when introducing these. Neither one is more common, so these will simply have to be memorized. EE and EA Vowel TeamsĮE and EA sometimes spell the long e sound in the beginning, middle, or end of a base word. Of course, students should be confident with the magic e syllable. Examples include eve, delete, and extreme. This one is usually in the middle of a base word. The e silent e spelling pattern is actually not that common. Students must understand how to split words into syllables and know what open syllables are. Sometimes ee or ea are used at the end of a word ( tea) so it’s not a rule that the long e sound at the end of a syllable is always spelled with just e. Some examples include b e, even, and v eto. Spelling Generalizations for Long E E aloneĪt the end of an open syllable, e makes the long e sound (says its name) and this is the most common way of spelling the long e sound. Students should also be able to find the base word, as some of these rules apply to the base word even if it has a suffix. The majority of these are vowel teams, so students should already know the open, silent e, and vowel team syllables. The long e sound can be represented by 8 different spelling patterns:
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