VCE Syllables - The Reading and Spelling Rules That Nobody Taught You

Raise your hand if you feel like the English language makes no sense! If you just raised your hand, you are not alone. There are so many rules and what seems like exceptions to the rules that it can be hard to keep track.

To make all these rules a little easier to follow, we like to organize the rules using the six syllable types.

Never heard of the six syllable types? Not to worry, you can read more about them here! Syllable types are important because they help to predict the vowel sound.

Sometimes vowels create a short vowel sound, sometimes they create a long vowel sound (typically the case in VCE syllables), and sometimes they create a different sound altogether.

Today, we are talking about -

VCE Syllables or Vowel Consonant E Syllables

A vowel-consonant-E syllable (also known as VCE, Magic E, or Silent E) occurs when a vowel is followed by a consonant followed by an “e” (e.g., bike, hope, cute). The “e” is silent and the preceding vowel usually makes a long sound.

How To Teach VCE Syllables - Reading Process

We always follow a step-by-step process to teach VCE syllables:

1 - Find/color the vowels in red

This is important because we need to be able to visually see the vowel to determine what type of syllable we have.

2 - If the syllable ends in an “e”, check to see if there is ONE consonant between the “e” and a vowel before the consonant (e.g., is there a vowel, then a consonant, then an “e”)

The “e” can only “jump” over one consonant to make the vowel sound long so if there is more than one consonant, you likely will not have a “VCE” syllable type.

3 - If a VCE syllable exists, create an arc between the “e” and the preceding vowel. Cross out the “e” ad mark the preceding vowel with a macron

A macron looks like a straight line. It signals that the vowel sound is long (as in the name of the vowel, A, E, I, O, U/oo).

4 - Read the syllable (remember the vowel sound is long).

If there are multiple syllables, blend each syllable together to read the entire word. A syllable is a word or part of a word with one vowel sound so if there is more than one vowel followed by a consonant, the word has more than one syllable.

How To Teach VCE Syllables - Spelling Process

When teaching spelling, we like to use a 4-Step Process:

1 - Identify how many syllables are in the word

Grab these fun spelling activities in the 5CCL Library!

We like to have students scoop the syllables (or in this example, visualize the syllables with umbrellas), this is important because each syllable needs at least one vowel sound (which might be a VCE syllable!)

2 - Identify how many sounds are in the word

We like to have students underline or dot the number of sounds they hear (in this example, we made it more fun by having the students mark the sounds with little suns - they could also use stamps or stickers!).

3 - Identify the type of sound

Is the sound a vowel sound or a consonant sound? Is the vowel sound short or long? They can color-code sounds if helpful!

4 - Identify the type of syllable

This is important because specific syllable types have specific spelling rules. There are a few spelling patterns that are specific to VCE syllables. Furthermore, it can be helpful for students to know whether a word is a VCE syllable or a vowel team syllable for spelling words like “plane” versus “plain.”

VCE Syllable Spelling Patterns

Long vowel sounds are challenging to spell because there are so many options!!! When making these determinations we often look to frequency to help students make the best “guess” if they aren’t sure whether to use a VCE or vowel team spelling option. So for example, if you hear a long A vowel sound in a word, there is a 36% chance it will be a VCE pattern. However, if you hear a long E vowel sound, there is only a 1% chance it will be a VCE pattern. So adding an “E” to the end of a syllable to create a VCE word makes sense if you hear a long A, but not so much sense if you hear a long E.

There are also some other rules we teach with the VCE syllable type!

When “S” gets stuck between two vowels - it sounds like “Z!”

Did you know that when an S gets stuck between two vowels it says /z/? Think about words like rose, nose, muse, wise, use, and these. In each of these VCE words, the S is stuck between two vowels and is making a /z/ sound. In fact, “s” says /z/ more often than “z” says /z/ when spelling!

No English Word Ends in V

So we need an E to hold it up. Sometimes the E still jumps over to make the vowel long and sometimes it uses all of its power to hold up V, so the vowel stays short (e.g., save, shave, chive, brave, live, give, and have). Notice how some of the vowel sounds are long and some of the vowel sounds remain short.

Schwa Sounds - OVE gets lazy!

You will also see endings like -ove. Here, the O gets lazy and makes what we call the schwa sound. This happens in words like love, dove, glove, above, and shove.

Explicitly Teaching VCE Syllables

We typically start our instruction with closed syllables and then progress to VCE syllables. We do this because closed syllables are the most common syllable type. Once students have mastered closed syllables, it’s a very seamless transition to add an “e” to the end, and boom…you’ve created a VCE syllable. Now students can practice transitioning between short and long vowel sounds.

For example, mop becomes mope, hat becomes hate, cop becomes cope, hop becomes hope. You can see where this is going.

When teaching syllable types, we like to provide a visual with a keyword. For example, when teaching VCE, we provide the visual of a “Magic E” to help them lock that pattern into memory.

We then provide explicit instruction on the rules the pattern follows. For example, we use s to spell /z/ in a VCE syllable.

We move in a building progression from the sound level to the syllable/word level and then have students generalize to the sentence level, paragraph level, and beyond.

How do I get started?

If you need help mastering all these rules, we’ve got you. We put all the rules we teach together in our Comprehensive Rules Guide which you can grab here! It’s a fabulous place to get started.

Or, if you’re ready for the next step and you’re looking for comprehensive lesson materials to explicitly teach all of the phonogram patterns, you can check out our systematic phonics-based curriculum, Delivering SMARTER Intervention here.