Word Work/Flip the Sound with –ed Endings
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I was working with some second graders who were looking at the word wind. We had a great discussion about the trickiness of English and how when we come across words like this, we have to use the words around it to figure out which pronunciation is correct.
He will wind the yo-yo string back onto the toy.
The wind blew his kite into a tree.
These same students often pronounced –ed endings just one way, to the detriment of their accuracy. Together we discovered that –ed endings make three different sounds: /d/ /id/ /t/.
For example, in the first five pages of Wolf! by Becky Bloom, we were able to collect the following:
/d/ /id/ /t/
wandered educated ached
tired treated leaped
remembered repeated
peered
complained
ignored
learned
Students were asked to spend 10 minutes doing word work, searching their own good-fit books for –ed words and recording them in categories. Later, they shared their lists with partners, checking to see if they were in agreement about where the words belonged.
When we met together, we analyzed the lists to see if we could discover hard and fast patterns. For instance, students discovered that if the root word ended in a d or a t, the –ed ending added another syllable to the word. It’s discoveries like that that make word work fun, engaging, and beneficial for increasing accuracy and improving spelling.