What hat?

What Hat? 

SHHH!!! Silence is part of English. There are numerous words like comb and thumb that have unsounded letters. Whale and which also contain silent letters. When it comes to spelling, it’s easy to forget these important word members. However, we can find some helpers along the way.

Many of my students struggle with words that begin with wh. They often forget to write the h so when gets written as wen. One way to spell this correctly is to find the smaller words inside of when. If you look closely, you can see he in the middle. If you add an n after he, you get hen. You are just one letter away now. By placing a w in front of hen, you can make when. What works the same way.

Inside of what, you can find smaller words like at and hat. You can even find ha, a short form of the sound of laughter. So, to spell what correctly, start with ha and add a t after it. That spells hat. Now, put a w in front of hat and you get what. Know what? Now you do.

Until next time…

C our age?

It’s easy for me to take spelling for granted. I’m a phonics teacher and a native English speaker but many of you don’t have my skills and experience. I was a top speller in my classes all the way through my education. I won many spelling bees ( spelling competitions) and had to spend very little time on my spelling corrections. It has served me well over the years. (Now, if I could only do the same for my typing.;)

                                                       Issacar red?

I was helping a student spell scared  and noticed some ‘little’ words. The ‘are’ is pronounced air so it could come out as skaired. Can you see ‘red’ at the end of that word? SKAIRED…See it now? He knew how to spell red so we went with that. I also showed him that ‘car’ is in there but the ‘r’ is shared with ‘red’:  cared. By now, he had most of the word spelled and just needed to add the initial s to complete it: s+car+ed.. . scared. We can find ‘are’ pronounced as air in words like fare, bare, ware, share and care.

                                                          C our age?

How many of you noticed that spells courage? That is not an easy word to spell. It means bravery. It means the opposite of fear. If you spelled it phonetically ( the way it sounds), it might come out kurrij. I teach my students to get the sounds right first and then fix the spelling. We can find more ‘little’ words in our new word. Let’s look…

There are two letters that make the /k/ sound:c and k. Most kids will pick the k. ‘Our’ is a bit tough to spell but most students will know it from the possessive adjective:our house, our teacher… So, continuing our spelling journey we have, c+our and we just need to add ‘age’. Again, this is not a phonetic word and needs some effort. We can find ‘age’ in words like page and wage. Most people know how to spell ‘page’, so I tell them that it’s the same as the last part of courage. Now we have c+our+age: courage. Piece of cake!

I hope by now that you are starting to see the ‘little’ words in the whole word. Btw, did you notice that word has or in the middle?;)

If these articles are helping you, please let me know by Liking, commenting and sharing this. Thanks so much…

Stay tuned for more English Hacks!

Until next time…

R you Ready?

Spelling English words correctly can be very trying. There are so many rules to remember: i before e except after c.  How about this one: when a word has one syllable + 1 vowel next to 1 consonant we double up the final consonant with a vowel suffix. Say WHAT???  It’s enough to make you pull you hair out. Don’t you wish there was a better way? Well…there IS! There are many little tricks and secrets to English.  Here’s a biggie…LITTLE words.  Yep!  The secret to spelling harder words in English is to look for little words that you already know how to spell. Let’s look at some…

Where or Wear? 

Many kids struggle with the spelling of ‘where’ because the ‘ere’ sounds like ‘air’.  I often see wair for ‘where’. This is what we call a sight word.  You know how to say it by sight. It’s much easier to spell it if you remember some smaller words: her and here. We can build the correct spelling by using words we already are proficient at spelling. Most kids can spell ‘her’. All we do is add an ‘e’ to ‘her’ to get ‘here’ and then put a ‘w’ in front of ‘here’ to get ‘where’. BINGO! Simple, right?

Can you hear me? 

Another often confused spelling pair is ‘here’ and ‘hear’.  When we are talking about what we do with our ears, the spelling becomes very clear. We HEAR with our EAR. Hear has the word ear in it. How cool is that? Sadly, not all English words work this way but there are many and I hope to show these to you as time goes by.

Thank you so much for reading this initial blog post.  I sincerely hope it has helped you with your spelling and has given you a new strategy to decipher the difficult code that is English spelling. We can thank the Franks, Saxons, Romans, Norse and Normans for all of this.

If you liked this post, please Like it and leave a comment. Until next time…