Silent-E (CVCe) Words

Long a silent-e words are spelled a, a consonant, then e, and the a says its name. The first eight come in pairs with the short-a word each grew from, so your child can see one letter change the sound: a cap goes on your head, and a cape goes on a superhero. The rest cover the other endings a_e words use most, from make and game to face, page and sale. Start with this group before the other vowels.

Long i silent-e words are spelled i, a consonant, then e, and the i says its name. Start with the four pairs: say the short word and then the long one, kit and then kite, and ask your child what changed. Only one letter did, and it is the one letter in the word you cannot hear. The other eight, from bike and time to five, rice and life, have no short partner but follow the same rule.

Long o silent-e words are spelled o, a consonant, then e, and the o says its name. The four pairs come first (hop and hope, not and note), and short o and long o sound further apart than any other pair here, so they are the easiest to hear. The other seven, including joke, home, nose and stove, fill in the endings the pairs miss. Watch for -ve words in books: stove and drove follow the rule, but love, glove and dove (the bird) keep a short sound.

Long u silent-e words are spelled u, a consonant, then e, and they make two long sounds. In cube, cute, use, mule and huge the u says its name, “yoo”. In rule, rude and flute it says “oo”, and both count as long u; tube and tune can go either way, depending on where you live. The four pairs come first, and use is the one word with no first consonant: us becomes use.

Long e has a silent-e pattern too, e_e, but it is the rarest of the five: these, theme, eve, gene and scene are among the few short words that use it. Long e is usually spelled ee or ea instead (see, feet, seat, team), so a child meets e_e far less often than a_e or i_e, and mostly in longer words like compete, delete and athlete, where it spells the last syllable. Three look-alikes are worth a warning: there, where and were end in e_e but do not say long e.

Three small groups of words end in a silent e that does not make the vowel long, and the biggest is the -ve words. English words almost never end in v, so an e goes on the end whether the vowel is long or not. Five, drive, stove and cave follow the silent-e rule. Have, give, love, glove and above keep a short vowel, because their e is there for the v and not for the vowel. Live is said both ways: a live show, but fish live in water.

Only the -ve words have a rule behind them, so teach that one as a rule. When a word ends in ve, have your child try the long vowel first and, if that does not make a word they know, the short one: five is long and give is short, and both are spelled the same way. Love, glove and above add a second twist, because their short vowel is the u in cup, spelled with an o.

The other seven are learned as words rather than sounded out. Come, some, done and none say the u in cup, and move, prove and lose say the oo in moon. The consonants in each still follow their letters (the c and m in come, the m and v in move), so the only part to practice is the vowel. Three more look-alikes, there, where and were, are covered with the long e words.

The worksheets start with four look-alike pairs: gave and have, five and give, home and come, bone and done, each pair ending in the same three letters. The sort asks your child to write each word under short or long, which is the question to ask of any silent-e word, and come and done go under short because they say the u in cup. For more -ve practice, the 2nd grade -ve words sort five, drive, stove and cave against have, give, love and glove.

A silent e ladder is the only one where the letter that changes is never the last one. The e sits at the end of all eight rungs and never moves, and the vowel it is working on never moves either. Everything that changes happens in front of them.

That is worth a whole sheet because it is the thing children get wrong about silent e: they read the e as a sound, or they drop it when they write. Eight rungs where the e is the one letter they never have to think about is eight chances to notice that it is still there, doing its job from the end of the word.