I have often been told that English is the most difficult language to learn. Being a native English speaker, this is difficult for me to understand. However, when you look at it through the eyes of a 9 or 10 year-old, I can see what people mean. There are so many rules, and even if a student knows a rule, there are exceptions to every rule. There are homophones, homographs, prefixes, suffixes and root words. And there are a lot of words that you just have to memorize because they don't have any rules to help you.
Even so, it is important to teach students as many rules as possible to help them learn patterns so they can be successful spellers. This week I will be teaching about silent consonants. To do this, I will create six different groups of cards with six different silent consonant patterns.
kn (silent k) st (silent t) mb (silent b) lk (silent l) wr (silent w)
knight listen thumb talk wrong
knit soften lamb calf wrinkle knock whistle climb walk wrestle knoll often comb half wrist
ght (silent gh)
thought
drought
right
night
Each person at a table will get one of the words in the pattern. Students will be told to identify the pattern or rule in their group. Each group will then compose a sentence that explains the common pattern of the words. The group will write this complete sentence on a poster, and write their sample words I gave them on the poster underneath the sentence. Each group will also add other words to the poster that fit the rule.
Students will then go around to the different posters to examine the rules. They will have about 2 minutes at each poster/table, and while they are there, they need to add as many words they can think of that fit the rule too (each team will have a different color marker so we can tell which team added what words). Everyone will be encouraged to participate.
*This "Card Sorts" activity was adapted from Rebecca Bowers Sipe's book, They Still Can't Spell?
Here is a fun electronic game students can play to practice this skill: Silent Invaders
I tried this with my students last week, and it was great for them to think of other strategies that would help them think of examples for each word that weren't already on the poster. For one rule, the silent k, they found the dictionary was an easy resource to use to find more examples. For the rest, using the dictionary wasn't as helpful. The other strategy they learned about was using rhyming to find words that illustrate the same rule or pattern.
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