Reading and Spelling Words with Silent e (Free Printable Included)

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When teaching reading and spelling, it is important to be explicit. By this, I mean that we stop, “pull out” words from the actual text and talk about them and the patterns within them. What group of letters works together to make a certain sound? Is there a “tricky” part to this word? How is this word like that word? What other words have this same pattern or group of letters? What can we learn from that to help us read and spell other words?

Being explicit means we don’t leave the learning up to “chance”. It’s all laid out there for the student to see and experience. This is a good practice for all students, but especially those that struggle with reading.

The Multiple Roles of Silent e

Take for example silent e. We typically start with silent e‘s “magical” role to change the vowel in the word to a long sound (such as can to cane). Developmentally speaking, this is where we should start with silent e.

But as kids grow in their reading, they will encounter many more words that place silent e in a different role. If we are not explicit about the silent e‘s role in words like have, chance, or angle, students are left to think that there are many exceptions to the magical e rule. I touched briefly on this topic in this older post but just recently, my 2nd grade son and I took a closer look at silent e.

Silent e Word Sort

ALuv is currently working through Level 3 of All About Reading {review coming in January}. I love how explicit All About Reading is about silent e‘s multiple roles. We have also been working through some word sorts from Words Their Way on the silent e‘s role as well.

To help him put it all together, I created a simple silent e word sort that contains the four most common roles of silent e for him to work through for a week. All About Reading introduces more roles, but I just picked the four most common for the texts he’s reading right now. (I have permission from All About Reading to share my free printable with you.)

I printed off the silent e sort (the FREE download link is at the end of this post) and he cut it apart. We placed the headers at the top: Soft C/G, Long Vowel, Vowel in Syllable, and After the V. He read through each word (with my support) and then on the first day, he sorted the words under the role that the silent e played: either soft c/g, long vowel, vowel in syllable, or after the v. We talked about any words that seemed tricky and word meanings, if necessary. If you would like to see how exactly I introduce a word sort, click here.

Silent e Word Hunt

All week long, he resorted the words and did different activities with it, like the ones you see in this post. On Day 4, he went on a word hunt through text to find words with silent e. Word hunts are some of my favorite activities to do when learning to spell words by their patterns or phonics features. I just love how it connects the spelling pattern to real reading.

In his word notebook, a notebook we keep for his spelling (phonics patterns and sight words), I jotted down a quick chart. As he read through some of the books in his independent reading bin, he looked for words with silent e and wrote them down under the category in which they belonged. Notice that I included an Other category, as we did not cover all the roles of silent e in this sort.

 

To download the Silent e Word Sort, click HERE!

 

More Reading and Spelling Resources

• Long Vowel Word Study App – activities for learning the long vowel patterns, on Google Play and iTunes!
• All About Reading
• Words Their Way Products
• 10 Days of Word Study
• More FREE Elementary Printables from This Reading Mama

 

Enjoy!

~Becky