How to Teach the ee/ey Spelling Rule

Green, keys, these…so many long E sounds!

This week we want to talk about how we teach the ee/ey vowel teams.

Both “ee” and “ey” say the long E sound.

We usually use “ee” in the middle of the word (think green, teen, sneeze) and “ey” at the end of the word (key, monkey, trolley, kidney).

To help our students remember this rule, we use the keywords “green” and “key.”

How do you teach ee/ey in a reading intervention setting?

We always follow the same order for our vowel team instruction. We take students from the sound, to the word, to the sentence, to the passage level for both reading and writing, making sure to hit on all 5-Core Components of Literacy throughout the lesson.

By working through this progression, students are better able to see how all of the pieces come together and can better generalize their knowledge of the phonogram rule. We start every lesson with phonological awareness work to help students “warm up their brain” before jumping into phonics at the word level.

How to introduce EE/EY at the sound level

Whenever we introduce a new sound pattern to students, we have them practice writing the pattern while repeating the rule. For the ee/ey vowel teams, they would say, “ee says E” (or “ey says E”) three times.

The mix of visually seeing the letters, hearing the letters and the sound, and writing the letters provides your lesson with a critical multisensory component. The great part about this is that they can do this in both in-person and virtual sessions!

How to teach the ee/ey vowel teams at the word level

After we’ve taught students the ee/ey pattern at the sound level we move on to word-level reading. We often start by providing the words broken down by individual phonemes (sounds) so that our students can practice identifying each sound and then blending them together to make a word.

In addition to your phonics instruction here, we also recommend vocabulary work like identifying parts of speech, defining words, and identifying unfamiliar and nonsense words!

Teaching ee/ey at the sentence-level

Next, we move on to sentence-level reading. Be sure to work with students to identify the target phonogram in the

sentences, so that they are explicitly taught how to apply their sound & word-level knowledge to the sentence level. During sentence-level instruction, you can also work on breaking the sentence into the subject (who/what) and the predicate (did what) with students.

Vowel Teams EE and EY at the passage level

After the sentence level, we move on to reading ee & ey at the passage level. This is where we will address passage-level fluency and ask questions to target reading comprehension. We like to mix up the types of passages (fiction, non-fiction, fables, etc.) that we present to students so that they can learn about different kinds of text.

EE and EY writing

After going through the entire progression for reading, we will go back and work through the entire progression for spelling and writing. This looks like completing ee/ey based phonological awareness activities, an auditory drill, spelling, sentence, and paragraph writing.

If you are looking for print and/or digital activities to add to your instruction, you can grab ours in our TPT shop using the links below!

Music Credit: Bensound.com