The plural spelling rules we have covered this week are as follows.
Words ending in y (that have a consonant in front of them)
‘We drop the y and add an i’ then es
lady – ladies
baby – babies
Words ending in the /f/ sound
We drop the f and add an es
wolf – wolves
shelf – shelves
dwarf – dwarves
Words ending with a /ch/ /sh/ /x/ /s/
We add es
church – churches
bus – buses
dish – dishes
fox – foxes
Dictionary Games
In class we have been using dictionaries to find the meaning of words. A good game to speed up how quickly children can find words is to have a race. You will need two similar dictionaries to play. One player suggests a word. Then, both players see who is the quickest to find it, that player gets to chose the next word.
This is good for building confidence sounding out words. It is also good for spotting similar words, or words with similar patterns (for example a prefix like tri or dis). It is also a really useful skill that can be applied to thesauruses, where the children can find similar words to improve a sentence.