As I have expressed before, letters are our symbols to show our thoughts as our words. But somethings we have to understand there are times when two letters make one sound.
Let's look at the word eat.
If we say eat slowly we hear two sounds: long e /E/ and /t/.
Eat is not like ete for some reason... I don't know and I don't care to know why... you can do your own digging... As a teacher, I just need to understand it and how to teach it.
I do teach my students what each letter is supposed to sound like: /e/ when we see e in a word like red has the sound like an /e/ in egg. But once it's connected to an a it forms ea and it now forms the long e /E/ like we hear and see in the word eat.
Now you can tell me sometimes ea is not /E/ like in the word bread where is it /e/. However, today is about two letters make one sound. So ea in bread is an example of two letters, one sound. We can also look at the word high... oh no three letters make one sound.
Do we see why English is so hard? So before we teach "i before e except after c" or "when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking" think- two letters, one sound. Saw: /s/ and /aw/. Two sounds are in the word saw, but three letters, why? Two letters make one sound!
I preach it until my kids teach it! I always believe we need movements to remember it. So hold up the peace sign and as you do say "two letters" then close the peace sign so your fingers are now touching making a thick number one and say "one sound."After a while if saying it, show and model this to your students starting at a young age when reading and writing. Get them familiar with looking for those patterns. Plus eat and saw are high frequency words so kids are exposed to this concept early on in their learning.
Two letters, one sound!
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