3. How to Teach Magic 'e'

In this section, we will walk you through the steps for teaching magic 'e' to your students.

• 3.1 Prepare for Instruction — Get to know the content and teaching strategies you’ll use.
• 3.2 Explicitly Teach the Skill — See how to introduce the new information to students and how to integrate it into future lessons.

At Reading Universe we use an evidence-based approach popularly known as structured literacy. Structured literacy is a way of organizing and delivering reading instruction to ensure students get all the skills they need in an efficient timeframe — and without any gaps. With this approach, teachers use explicit or direct instruction. Read more about structured literacy here.

We recommend a daily phonics lesson routine that looks something like this:

Download the Phonics Lesson Daily Checklist (opens in new window).

Your lesson will start with a quick phonemic awareness activity, what we call a Listening Game. For magic 'e' words, you could ask your students to identify the vowel sound in words. Here's an example you might try. Say,

The word is cane. [cane]

Let's stretch the sounds, /c/, /ā/, /n/. What is the vowel sound? [/ā/]

In the Warm Up you'll use flash cards to review the sounds or syllable patterns your students already know. For example, you will want to review both the short and long sounds of each vowel as well as any consonants or blends that might be used during dictation. Watch this demo to see how we recommend introducing the magic 'e' flash cards (opens in new window).

New/Review is where you will introduce magic ‘e’.

During Dictation, students will practice spelling words with magic 'e' that they just learned. 

All of this leads up to the last portion of the lesson, in which students practice putting all the skills together for Reading with Fluency.