teaching silent e

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2002 : November : 28

teaching silent e
By sj

There are five reasons for a silent final e that I know:
1. The e "jumps over" the consonant to make the vowel have its long sound
2. The e is present to keep the word from ending in v or u (English words don't
end in i, j, v, or u)
3. The e is present to cause the c or g to have its soft sound (c and g only have their soft sounds when followed by e, i, or y)
4. The e is present because the final stable syllable (ble, tle, gle...etc) would otherwise not have a vowel (and every syllable of an English word has at least one vowel)
5. The e is present as a holdover from archaic spellings

or misspellings that probably originated from copying errors when manuscripts were hand-copied.

I teach all 5 "rules" at once, using a pocket chart with each rule on a card at the top of a column. (I shorten them to: CVe, VU, CG, Cle, ?)
Then I have kids sort word cards with words of each type into the columns. This is an introductory lesson, but it seems to help them make sense of it and sets the stage for reviewing each "rule" in later lessons.

I hope this is the type of help you were looking for!