OnTrack Reading

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, a marker is defined as a letter or digraph that always follows a First Vowel Sound. Put another way, when your child sees a marker in a word, he needs to learn that the letter in front of it represents the First Vowel Sound for that letter consistently. That is, it marks the vowel sound as a First Vowel Sound.

The definition of the term marker will very likely not sink in at the first telling, so you will need to repeat it occasionally until your child can tell you in his own words what it is.

There are four markers. They are the digraphs ck, tch, dge plus the letter x. The patterns they occur in are ack, eck, ick, ock and uck for ck, atch, etch, itch, otch, and utch for tch, adge, edge, idge, odge and udge for dge and ax, ex, ix, ox and ux for x.

The only common exception is the word butch and its variations, like butcher. Also, in some parts of the country you will need to take care to pronounce catch to rhyme with match and not with sketch, but this is an easy adaptation to make.

In multisyllable words, the dge changes slightly, because the letter e gets split off as the vowel sound, or part of the vowel sound, in the following syllable. Thus, bridge, but bridg-es, and dodge, but dodg-er. This means that dg is the marker in multisyllable words.

Now, combining the information from the Guide Page Adding Suffixes to CVC Words with the information from this Page gives us two important tools that your child should use when decoding multisyllable words.

The first tool in the multisyllable toolkit is to always add doubled consonants to the end of a syllable. Since this would no longer technically be called a syllable, in the OnTrack Reading curriculum it will be called a chunk. So, always add doubled consonants to the end of a chunk. Once this is done, your child can almost always assume that the vowel sound in the chunk will be the First Vowel Sound. (See the Pages on multisyllable decoding for a discussion of the few rule-breakers.)

The second tool in the multisyllable toolkit is to always add a marker to the end of a chunk. Again, once this is done, your child can almost always assume that the vowel sound in the chunk will be the First Vowel Sound. (Here the main exception is the word butcher and its variations.)

Following are three worksheets that you can download for your child to practice the above concepts on. The first of the three need not be done unless your child is having some trouble sticking to the First Vowel Sound when it appears in the middle of a three-letter word. If so, you will need to work to instill that pattern. The second worksheet covers doubled consonant patterns and the third covers patterns involving the four markers.

Download First Vowel Sound Patterns - Part One

Download First Vowel Sound Patterns - Part Two

Download First Vowel Sound Patterns - Part Three

Next: Reading the Suffix “ed”, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page