When to Spell with “k”
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.
Unfortunately, British spellings aren’t adapted to this rule; several British words violate it. but in U.S. spellings there are very few exceptions, “soccer” being one of them.
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 as well in British 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.
As an extension of this tip, you could also explain that most one-syllable words ending with the /k/ sound end with either a k (work, lurk, link, bark, etc.) or a ck (sack, neck, sick, etc.) so that we can 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.
If you’ve been working your way through the Tidbits section of the Guide, the next Page explains why reading curricula should present the spellings ar and or as digraphs.
Next: The Digraphs “ar” and “or”, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page.