OnTrack Reading

A very young child is probably best off just using visual memory to recall the spellings of the /k/ sound in words like cat, keg, duck and school, but once he is capable of decoding words of more than one syllable, and has learned the Rule of ‘c’, some spelling tips for the /k/ sound might be worth pointing out.

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, I wait until a child is well into multisyllable instruction and then introduce them to the Rule of c which was discussed in the Tidbit section The Sounds of the Letter c.

To refresh memories, the rule is: The letter c represents /s/ before the letters e, i or y; otherwise it represents /k/. Note: I usually use /c/ to mean the sound in cat, but here I’m using /k/ for clarity.

British spellings aren’t quite as faithful to this rule, but in the U.S. there are very few exceptions. The words “soccer” and “muscle” and the city name “Tucson” are among the few examples where we violate the rule.

As I said, I generally wait until a child is well into multisyllable decoding before introducing this rule and then I tell them that it will be a very useful rule to apply before starting to chunk the word because longer words often have one, two, or even three, c’s in them. As they begin to realize this, most of my clients see the immediate utility of the rule and actually learn it.

Out of this comes a spelling tip that can be quite useful, though I rarely teach it in the short time I spend with my clients. However, I would certainly use it in a classroom, as it appears to work most of the time.

The tip? “If the Rule of c says the letter c won’t work then use the letter k.”

Note these qualifying conditions:

1) It doesn’t work quite as well in British English as in U.S. English.

2) They still need to realize that some /k/ sounds are spelled ck (duck) or ch (school.)

That said, we spell keg, kennel, kitten, kite, sky and murky as we do because otherwise the Rule of c would force the pronunciations seg, sennel, sitten, site, ssy and mursy. Hence, the tip: We use k if c won’t work.

Here’s another useful tip: At the end of a one-syllable word, we tend to spell the /k/ sound using either the digraph ck, or the letter k. The digraph ck is used after a short vowel spelling (ack, eck, ick, ock, uck); otherwise just the letter k (work, oak, leak, bank, talk, ask, etc.) is used.

And finally, one last tip: The letter c is generally used when spelling the /i/k/ sounds at the end of many multisyllable words (automatic, static, chronic).

Note that the use of k or ck for ending a one-syllable word allows us to add the common suffixes that start with e, i or y without running afoul of the Rule of c. Otherwise, we would have many more awkward situations like we have with words like panic, where we switch to ck when adding a suffix beginning with e, i or y (panicked, panicking, panicky) to avoid violating the Rule of c.

Why do I call these tips, rather than rules? Because it’s English, and there are almost always exceptions, but actually I think the tips here are pretty reliable guides to the spelling of the /k/ sound.

If you’ve been working your way through the Tidbits section of the Guide, the next Page explains how the OnTrack Reading Phonics Curriculum presents the spellings wh and th and the reasons the choices made are important.

Next: The Digraphs “wh” and “th”, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page.