5th Grade Spelling Week 17
Silent Letters
Explanation:
- They help the reader to distinguish between homophones (homophones have the Same sound but different meaning and different spelling and there are loads of these nightmare words in English) in/inn, be/bee,to/too/two, know/no, whole/hole, knot/not,
- A silent letter can help us work out the meaning of the word and it also can change the pronunciation even though it’s silent – sin/sign, rat/rate
- Magic ‘e’ – if you add ‘e’ at the end of short vowel sound words it elongates the sound – rid/ride, cop/cope, hat/hate, tap/tape, at/ate, mat/mate.
- Sometimes people might pronounce certain letters or they might not depending on their accent, for example the t in ‘often’ can be pronounced or not.
- H is silent in a lot of accents. For me h is a difficult letter to pronounce because I grew up dropping the hand my muscle memory doesn’t like it at all! But the H is silent in some words from French – hour, honest, honour, heir, herb (in American)
- They show the origins and history (etymology) of a word.
Word Bank:
- wreckage
- disguises
- column
- chemical
- foreign
- wrinkle
- moisten
- character
- condemn
- resign
- knuckle
- numb
- wrist
- choir
- wrong
- wrestled
- technology
- mechanic
- anchor
- debt
Science Content Words:
- orbit
- rotation
- revolution
- axis
- moon phases
