Syllables and Affixes

Early Syllables and Affixes

• Spells blends, digraphs, and short vowels

• use but confuse consonant doubling and e-drop

• occasional deletion of reduced syllables

Middle Syllables and Affixes

• spells doubling and e-drop with inflectional endings more often

• use but confuse unaccented final syllables

• common to miss doubled consonant for absorbed prefixes

Late Syllables and Affixes

• spells vowel patterns in unacctend syllables

• use but confuse some suffixes and prefixes

• few things are completely missing

Help children develop a spelling conscience. Talk with your child about why good spelling matters (to be sure readers can understand what we write; to help us be better readers) and when it matters. Brain-storm with them a list of the kinds of writing that need to be correctly spelled.

Practice developing dictionary skills. Children should understand how to use this skill so they know it is available to them. There are spelling dictionaries that contain lists of commonly used words without definitions that may be easier to use.

Create Semantic Maps. These provide an excellent way to activate childrens' background knowledge on a topic by asking them to brainstorm words related to a topic, which gives you an idea of how much they already know. This helps them recognize words within a general academic context.

English Language Learners have mastered many of the basic phonics and spellings generalizations by this stage and are ready to study the more advanced features of this stage. However, many of the words used in sorts at this stage may be new vocabulary. Make word study a language-learning event.

• spend the time needed to understand silent consonants that will help them make spelling-meaning connections that will be explored in the next stage

• utilize bilingual dictionaries that show relations between words in their native language to English

• use their commonly misspelled words in conversational speech and define these words in reading material