Challenge words

This last band is not a single pattern. It is the long words that combine everything already learned and add the endings that come with older texts: the -tion of 'information' and 'celebration', the -ture of 'adventure', the -cious and -ious of 'delicious' and 'mysterious'. Alongside them sit genuinely irregular words worth knowing anyway — 'beautiful', 'restaurant', 'knowledge' — and words built from meaningful parts, like thermo + meter.

How it is taught

At this length sounding out letter by letter stops being useful, and children are moved onto attacking a word by its parts: a prefix, a base they recognise, an ending. 'Impossible' is im plus possible; 'celebration' is celebrate plus ion; 'understand' is two known words. Recognising the base is what makes the spelling stick, because the base usually keeps its own spelling even when the pronunciation shifts. The handful of true irregulars are separated out and simply memorised.

Where children get stuck

• -tion is written as it sounds: 'informashun', 'celebrashun'. It is one of the most common endings in English and repays being taught as a single unit.
• Unstressed syllables keep vanishing at this length: 'diffrent' for 'different', 'intresting' for 'interesting', 'resturant' for 'restaurant'.
• Silent letters that no strategy predicts — the k in 'knowledge', the eau in 'beautiful' — are exceptions and should be named as such rather than dressed up as a rule.
• Choosing between -ible and -able, as in 'impossible', is difficult for adults too, and is not worth presenting to a child as something they should be able to work out.

Word list

Printable flashcards

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