As I worked on new Pink Series books, I wanted a quick reference list for extra CVC words, so I looked online. What a mess! Everything I saw was wrong.
So I wanted to share a few pointers to help everyone working with children at this stage of reading.
“is” — a horrible vowel-consonant word because the “s” pronunciation is not the standard one.
CVC material can contain longer words that use short vowels and standard (the most common) consonant pronunciations. Words such as “animal” and “camel” are examples of these longer words. But when two consonants are together, the CVC pattern is now broken, so the word is either a Blue or Green Series word. For example, it is common to see lists that include weird extra groups of letters such as “ack” or “eck.” These groupings are nonsense. They don’t exist. For example, “back” uses “ck,” so we introduce “ck” in the Blue Series. But children do not study the “ck” with each vowel! This is an example of someone trying to make extra stuff to sell.
Similarly, combinations such as “id,” “ip,” and “im” do not exist. We teach the individual letters. Words such as rid, rip, and rim are simple CVC words. Again, all of these made-up categories exist to generate sales of stuff, not teach children.
Words with silent letters do not belong in the CVC or Pink Series category.
There is no need to ask children to learn “the” early. It is only done to make adults happy. The two “th” sounds are introduced later in the voiced and unvoiced forms — “them” versus “thin.”
CVC words cannot contain alternate pronunciations of vowels. For example, “pull” is wrong because the standard short “u” sound is heard in “pup.”
“and” is a Blue Series word, but you can introduce it at the end of the Pink Series (as you move to the Blue Series) because all the sounds are standard (the most commonly used).
There is no such thing as sight words!
(My Pink Series work is on our Etsy store.)
Happy teaching!