Teaching spelling generalisations: Eat bread transcript

Elaine Stanley:

Our last spelling generalisation we're going to show today is ‘Eat bread’, two of the most common sounds of the ea letter pattern. This spelling generalisation assists students to remember and apply the two most common sounds of this digraph as they're reading and spelling.

You can see this one is taught in Phase 13 of our progression and the asterisk next to the letter–sound correspondence tells you that there's more than one sound that this letter represents that students are going to learn.

I'm going to show this one as if we're doing it on a whiteboard because teachers don't always have access to the PowerPoints or it might be that you're just working with a small group or an intervention and you want to use a whiteboard. We'll show this one a little bit differently. I would introduce this by saying:

Teacher:

Today, we are learning about the digraph ea and two sounds that it can make, the two most common sounds that it can make. We use this heading, ‘Eat bread’, to help us.’

Ea can make a long sound /ē/ like in ‘eat’ or it can make a short e sound /e/, like in ‘bread’. When we show these headings, the most common sound always comes first. So /ē/ is the most common sound, but sometimes it says /e/. When I'm reading words today, I'm going to try the long sound /ē/ first, and if this doesn't work in a word, then I'll try the short sound /e/.

Here is my first word. I'm going to use my sounds and I'm going to try the long sound first.

/h/, /ē/, /t/. /h/-/ē/-/t/. Is that a word I know? Yep, that sounds right to me. ‘Heat’.

All right, next one. I'm going to try the long sound first. /th/, /r/, /ē/, /d/; /th/-/r/-/ē/-/d/, ‘threed’. Is that a word I recognise? No. I'm going to try the second sound, /e/ this time. /th/, /r/, /e/, /d/; /th/-/r/-/e/-/d/, ‘thread’. I know that word. Sometimes I do some sewing with a needle and thread, so I think it's /e/ this time.

Then I'll try this one with the long sound again.

/t/, /r/, /ē/, /t/. /t/-/r/-/ē/-/t/. ‘Treat’. I recognise that word. I sometimes buy treats at the shop.

Then you would do the same for spelling. Our first word is ‘team’, so I would stretch it.

Teacher:

/t/, /ē/, /m/. /t/-/ē/-/m/. ‘Team’. What can I hear? /t/, /ē/, /m/.

And you remind students, now when we hear that long e sound today, remember we're using this ea letter pattern, so then I would do that on the whiteboard, ‘team’.

The same with ‘leaf’. Stretch it, listen to the sounds. /l/, /ē/ /f/. And I'm using my ea and then one with the alternate sound, so I'm going to do ‘sweat’. /s/, /w/, /e/, /t/. And remembering when I hear the /e/ today, I'm using that ea letter pattern.

Then students would join in and do the same, remembering that most often it will make an /ē/ sound, sometimes an /e/ sound.

Teacher:

Let's have a go, Kerrie. We'll use our sounds.

Teacher and student:

/b/, /ē/, /t/. ‘Beat’.

Teacher:

We use long e first. Is that a word we recognise? ‘Beat’?

Student:

Yes.

Teacher:

Yes, like you might beat an egg or beat someone in a race. Let's try long e first.

Student:

/p/, /ē/, /s/. ‘Peas’.

Teacher:

‘Peas’, do you like peas?

And then we'll try this one, long sound first.

Teacher and student:

/r/, /ē/, /d/. ‘Read’.

Teacher:

Does that sound right, that word? Now actually this one's a really tricky one because we're going to try the other sound as well. Let's do the /e/ sound.

Teacher and student:

/r/, /e/, /d/. ‘Read’.

Teacher:

You could say, ‘I read my book every day’ or you could say ‘yesterday I read my book’. This one's really tricky because this can actually have both sounds and what we'd have to do is check our sentence around that word to see which one's right.

You can point out those sorts of things and homophones as well to students. Then, we do the same with spelling. For ‘cheap’, we'd have /ch/, /ē/, /p/, and students would join in. We'll just do ‘head’ together.

Teacher:

Kerrie, let's stretch it.

Teacher and student:

/h/, /e/, /d/. /h/-/e/-/d/. ‘Head’.

Teacher:

What sounds can you hear?

Student:

/h/, /e/, /d/.

Teacher:

Right, we've got an /e/ sound. I want you to think about how you make that /e/ sound today and you can chin it when you're ready.

Beautiful. You've remembered to use your ‘ea’s, have a look. This is how mine looks. It looks the same.

And then we could do the same for ‘beach’.

You would do the lesson exactly the same way. It's just on the whiteboard instead. And again, if you know how to teach ‘Eat bread’, it's the same for all of these spelling generalisations as well. You've got the two sounds for double o, long oo (as in ‘food’) and short oo (as in ‘good’), like ‘Food is good’.

This next one [‘Her bird is hurt’], you've got three common letter patterns for making an er sound. And again, the heading tells you which one's the most common. In this case, er is most commonly used to make an /er/ sound, then ir, then ur. That helps students make a choice. Try er first. If it's not right, well, you don't think it looks right, you can try the next one.

Then you've got ‘Pie piece’, two sounds of ie.

‘Grey monkey’, two sounds of ey.

And ‘Hear the early bear’, three sounds for ear.

They can all be taught in the same way.

One last thing. So what happens when students have lots of spelling patterns they know for one sound and then they have to make a choice between all of them? You can make a chart like this in your classroom, just on the whiteboard or just keep adding to it on the wall display maybe as students learn patterns. It's good for warm-ups to do this activity, but also incidental practice.

Let's look at the different sounds students have learned for ‘a’. What I would do for them is say, right, your word today that I'd like you to work out how to spell is ‘brain’.

They would stretch it. brain. /b/-/rain/. /b/, /r/, /ai/, /n/; /b/-/r/-/ai/-/n/. And then they're going to think about where they can hear that ‘a’ sound and then what I say to them first is, which ones can't it be? You're really getting them to think about what they've learned so they would know it can't be [short ‘a’] /ă/, because that's usually used at the end of a one-syllable word or at the end of the first syllable in a two-syllable word, so they would know it can't be that. They'd also know it can't be ay because in brain I can hear, /b/-/rain/, it's in the middle. They're left with these two choices.

Then sometimes students just go, ‘Oh, I know which one it is’, and they write it. Or if they're not sure, they can try it both ways and at least they've narrowed it down to 50-50 chance of getting it right and then they can actually still choose and say, ‘Right, I think that one looks right’, and it becomes like a bit of a game. ‘Who thinks it's this one?’ ‘Who thinks it's that one?’ ‘Yes, you are right this time.’

But it's really training students to do that process of elimination when they're spelling words and they've got to think about all the patterns they know.

Again, we could do the same for ‘glow’. This time they can hear it at the end. They know it can't be that one [o-e], it can't be that one [oa] because I'm going to hear those with a sound after it. It could be this [o], but there's not many words that just end in an o. And if they've learned the ow pattern, they're going to say, ‘I know it's this one’. It just helps them eliminate the ones it can't be and really think about and apply their spelling generalisations.