Long I Words

A silent e on the end reaches back over one consonant and makes the i say its name. Kit becomes kite, bit becomes bite, hid becomes hide. The e itself says nothing.

This is the commonest long i spelling and usually the first a child meets. The sound boxes below show why it is easy to see and hard to sound out: bike gets three boxes for three sounds, and the e sits on the line beside them with no box of its own.

Silent-e words has the full lists across all five vowels, and a section for the words that break the rule.

Igh is three letters spelling one sound, and the g and the h both say nothing. Light, night, right, high. A child who tries to sound out l-i-g-h-t gets nowhere, which is worth saying out loud before they try.

The sound boxes here are the clearest on the site. Light has five letters and three sounds, and igh goes into the middle box whole. Seeing three letters go in one box does more than any explanation.

Igh almost always comes before a t, which is a small rule but a true one: light, night, right, fight, sight, bright. High and sigh are the common exceptions, and they end there instead.

A y at the end of a one-syllable word says long i. My, fly, sky, cry, dry. In a longer word the same letter says long e instead: happy, baby, funny. The syllable count is what picks between them, and it is one of the few long-vowel spelling rules a five-year-old can use.

Ie at the end of a word is a short list: pie, tie, lie, die. The i comes first and the e second, which is worth pointing at, because the same two letters the other way round spell something else entirely.

The pictures are the useful part of this section. Fly and cry are the two y words that can be drawn at all: a child naming a housefly and a crying child hears the long i in both without reading anything, which is the step before the sort.

My, fly, sky, cry and dry are a rhyming family as well as a spelling family, which makes them unusually easy to practise. Rhyming words has the listening games that go with them.

Two endings make the i long even though nothing on the page marks it: -ind and -ild. Kind, mind, find, behind. Wild, child, mild. There is no silent e, no letter team and no y, which makes these the only long i words a child cannot see the reason for.

Usually, not always. Wind meaning moving air keeps its short i, and so does build. Those are learned as exceptions rather than argued about, and a child who has met both will ask about them anyway.

Point at the ending rather than the vowel. A child looking for the long i in kind has nothing to find; a child who learns that words ending -ind sound like kind has something they can use on a word they have never seen.

Say the two words one after the other and ask which one you said second. Kit and kite. Bit and bite. Hid and hide. The contrast is the lesson rather than the repetition.

Long i and short i are easy to tell apart once they are adjacent, which is what makes this vowel simpler than long e. The e and i short sounds are the ones children swap; long i sounds like nothing else on the page.

The picture sort works by sound and the word sort works by sight. Both are the same question asked of a child at two different stages: one before they can read the words, one after.

Where to go next depends on which part your child found hard.

• If igh was the hard one, that is expected: it is the only three-letter spelling on the page. More sound-box practice is the answer, and Elkonin boxes explains the method behind those sheets.
• If the y at the end was the surprise, long e words has the other half of that rule: the same letter says long e in a longer word.
• If kind and wild are still being read with a short i, they are the words to come back to last. They have no marker, so they are memory rather than decoding.
• Long vowel sounds explains all five long vowels together, with a printable chart, and long vowel words mixes all five.