Explore Tricky Words and how to teach them exampled by grade 1, Skills Unit 1
In Amplify’s K–2 Skills units, each lesson continues to challenge students as they progress, introducing complications like multisyllabic words, Tricky Words, and homophones. In each case, students encounter complications as they become ready for them. When a spelling can be sounded more than one way, we say that the spelling is a tricky spelling.
For example:
In grade 1 Skills Unit 1, students learn (or are reminded) that the letters ‘th’ can stand for two slightly different sounds: voiceless /th/, as in thin, and voiced /th/, as in them. (Teachers can use the pairs teeth/teethe and ether/either to help them hear the difference.) Students also learn that the letter ‘s’ is usually pronounced /s/ but is sometimes pronounced /z/. This pronunciation is used in a handful of very common words, including is, has, as, his, and was. It is also used in many cases when an ‘s’ is added to a word to mark a plural, as in dogs, or in the present-tense form of some verbs, as in she runs. Fortunately, neither one of these tricky spellings is likely to cause major difficulties while reading. The tricky spelling ‘th’ does not generally cause troubles because /th/ and /th/ sound very similar. The tricky spelling ‘s’ is also usually not problematic. It is pronounced /z/ after voiced sounds (dogs, bins) and /s/ after voiceless sounds (cats, ducks), but our mouths tend to choose /s/ or /z/ automatically, without having to think about it. (Try pronouncing dogs as /dogs/ as opposed to /dogz/; you will find that your mouth resists.) Students may need more time to learn when to spell /z/ with an ‘s’. An effort has been made to minimize the number of tricky spellings students are exposed to in the early part of grade 1. The tricky spellings are introduced gradually as the sequence progresses. Warm-Up lessons in grade 1 frequently begin with a Warm-Up exercise.