Blends: Irregular Sounds (J, G, DGE, DR)

When students are learning to decode and to spell, the invariably come up against irregular sounds and words and letters that have multiple sounds (depending on context, or on the particular word).

One set of commonly confused words includes words that make the J sound (as in jelly).

• j makes the j sound: jelly, jar, juice.
• g makes the j sound sometimes (soft g): age, gem, germ.
• dge usually makes the j sound: edge, knowledge.
• dr makes the j sound (try it! it does!): drink, drop, drip.

To make things even more complicated, g also has a "hard" sound in which it makes the g sound: goat, gum, goober.

Students often need to play with words to figure out which ones go in the same "families."  So, edge, ledge, knowledge, all go together and use the dge construction.  Likewise, words that end in ge usually make the j sound: garbage, luggage, lunge.  On the other hand, when g is followed by a vowel other than e, it usually makes the g sound: got, gasket, giddy-up, gusto.

Talk about these sounds and "families" as students read and write and learn to spell.  Also, use worksheets that push students to come up with words on their own. The worksheets below are also great for helping students build and use their vocabularies.  Answers are upside down on the backside.