Search Irregularly Spelled Word Educational Resources

An understanding of of irregularly spelled words allows your students to feel comfortable in their knowledge of the English language. By strengthening these skills, students can move on to more complex lessons that properly prepare them for future assignments and higher level tasks. Give your students the resources they need to succeed with these as well as our compound words resources.

The English language features many pitfalls for early learners. Once they learn the all the rules, they may think they can apply those rules and know how to spell any word. There are some words that seem to cast aside the rules. These are irregularly spelled words.
An irregularly spelled words is a word that is spelled contrary to the way it sounds. These can be difficult to spell from sound but also to read. Students will want to automatically pronounce the phonetic sound of each letter without realizing that these letters are behaving differently.
One of the reasons a word my be spelled irregularly is if the word contains a vowel digraph. A vowel digraph is when two vowels are written together and produce a single sound. Some vowel digraphs include ai, au, oo, ea, ei. Even these digraphs can produce different sounds depending on the word:

• AI can produce the long a sound (aid, wait, paint) or the short e sound (said, again)
• EA can produce the long e sound (bean, beat, leaf) or short e sound (bread, weather)
• EI can produce the long a sound (vein, reindeer), long e sound (receive, receipt), or the short e sound (heifer, foreign)

Consonant digraphs can also cause problems for beginning spellers. The digraph of gh, for example, will sometimes make no sound when reading words containing it: sight, nought. Other times it will make an f sound: cough, rough.
With irregularly spelled words, memorization using the resources provided above by Education.com could be a valid strategy.