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Grade 3 Reading & Writing · World 1: Word Detective Agency · Level 1
Hard and Soft C and G
Read and spell cat/cent, game/gem: c and g before e, i, y usually make the soft sound.
Warm-up, learn, try it together, practice, then a quick check. About 15 minutes.
What children learn in Level 1
- Welcome to the Word Detective Agency! Detectives look closely. Some letters make more than one sound, and the letters around them are the clues.
- The letter c has two sounds. In cat, c makes the hard sound, /k/. In city, c makes the soft sound, /s/.
- Here's the clue: c before e, i, or y usually makes the soft sound. Look: cent, city, ice. Before a, o, u, or a consonant, it's hard: cup, corn, crab.
- The letter g works the same way. Goat has a hard g, /g/. Gem and giraffe have a soft g, /j/.
- But g breaks the rule more often than c does: girl, give, get, and gift all have a hard g. If one sound doesn't make a real word, a good detective tries the other one.
- Your turn! Sort these words by the sound of their c.
Georgia's K-12 English Language Arts Standards:
- 3.F.P.4.a — Decode and encode words with graphemes that represent multiple letter-sound correspondences.