What is that ‘e’ doing at the end of some words?

It may never have crossed your mind, but when we see a single ‘e’ that we don’t hear at the end of words, there could be a number of reasons for it being there. A really common reason, which our early readers learn lots about, is to tell us that the preceding vowel is pronounced as a long sound. Think ‘late’, ‘slope’ or ‘bite’. At the moment, our grade 2 classes are investigating other reasons for the marker ‘e’ being there. So far, they’ve come up with the following:

• No complete English word ends in ‘v’, so we find an ‘e’ at the end of those words. Examples are: ‘give’, ‘love’ and ‘leave’.
• The marker ‘e’ tells us how to pronounce the ‘g’, as in ‘orange’ or ‘change’. This is different to the harder /g/ sound in ‘egg’ and ‘hug’.
• The marker ‘e’ tells us how to pronounce the ‘c’, as in ‘dance’, ‘fence’ and ‘notice’. It represents a /s/ sound as in ‘snake’.

Sometimes marker ‘e’ does more than one thing. For example, in ‘cage’ it is there to tell us the /a/ is making a long vowel sound, as well as how to pronounce the ‘g’. The marker ‘e’ at the end of a word can be there for other reasons, some of which our grade 2 word detectives will uncover as the year goes on.