Hearing letter sounds is a major key to learning to write and understand English. It can be confusing because many letters or letter combinations have more than one sound. Today I will go over one of the combinations – the suffix –ed. The suffix –ed is used to represent past tense; plenty of even smaller children may realize this. What a person may not have given attention to is that –ed makes three different sounds. A sentence to represent this (and practice) is: He rented a boat, jumped in and sailed off. Hear it? Rented — /ed/ (said like the name, Ed) Jumped — /t/ (sounds like the sound of a “t”)…
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They Come as a Team – Vowel Teams
So we’ve now gone through all of the syllable types except one in the REVLOC system of syllable division. We have covered C, E, O, R, and L. The final type of syllable is Vowel Teams – the V. These vowel teams are vowel sounds (it’s the sound, not just the letters) formed by two or more letters (notice it is letters, not vowels) within the same syllable. For example: Bee Bread Boy Light Eight In dividing a word, a Vowel Team syllable will look like this: Conceit con (closed or C) ceit (vowel team or V) As a side note: is this a vowel team? The word: Quit? NO!…
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Say, “Wuh”? Pronouncing Sounds
There are times when pronouncing a consonant letter, people will say it like this: For “m” someone might say, “muh” or “d,” “duh.” Actually, m says, “mmmm” and d says “d” (clipped, no uh on it). The sounds of letters are the smallest unit of sound in the English language. They are called phonemes (pronounced: phō-nēms). This is a good place to start with a child in OG. In class we made a deck to use. I use the deck by showing each card with a different consonant on it. I usually have this conversation, “Tell me what the letter says.” I hold up “m” and they say, “That is an m.”…
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Don’t Get Ruffled or Baffled by Consonant + le
So far, I have covered R, E, O, C in the REVLOC system of breaking down words to provide rules for easier word pronunciation. Next, comes the L, which stands for Consonant + LE syllable types. This type of syllable ALWAYS appears at the END of words. The E (the vowel in this type of syllable) is ALWAYS silent. Dictionaries may represent this syllable pronunciation as /b’l/ (to indicate the silence of the e). Examples of consonant + le syllables: ble able notice the split: a ble – a is an open syllable so it’s long, ble is cons. + le dle cradle Split: cra (open), dle (cons. + le)…