The 4 spellings of the sound long A

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Permalink Reply by called2beamom on September 8, 2009 at 7:49pm

My son missed that same word just today. I think it is a bit confusing because it has an a and a consonant and an e. I just explained that it is 2 syllables so the a is long because it is at the end of the syllable.

I think the rules so far in AAS are wonderful. We used Reading Reflex previously and that is all they did -give you a list of all the sounds and you just had to pick which one looked right. Totally didn't work for my son because he is not a visual learner. I love how AAS Spelling gives you the rules and then gives you this approach.

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Permalink Reply by Merry on September 12, 2009 at 1:36pm

Sometimes my kids will "miss-sort" words like this--they'd put paper under the VCE pattern instead of the open syllable pattern. So I then have them tell me how many syllables, and where to divide them--usually they get it then. But if they didn't and had "pape" and "r" then I'd say, "well, we can't divide there because every syllable needs a vowel, right? Where else could we divide?"

Merry :-)

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Permalink Reply by Merry on September 12, 2009 at 1:33pm

Sometimes the word-sorting exercises can be difficult--that's when they are trying to put all they've learned together. I usually talk my kids through if they misspell--paper is fairly direct. First I'd ask him to think about the syllables, and to try to spell each syllable. If your son can hear that it's "pay" and "per" for the syllables, then hopefully the long a at the end of a syllable rule will come to him, and he'll come up with "paper."

Another thing I do is work from the mistake--does their mistake logically work? And if not, why not (either because of how it sounds, or because of the rules they have learned?) Build the word with tiles and let him see the visual of it that way.

Yet another strategy--use the word cards for reading practice for words he commonly misspells. I also show my kids the word card every time they spell a word, whether they got it correct or not--I show it after they spell it I mean. This way they are continuing to get a visual reinforcement.

HTH some! Merry :-)

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