Silent e Word List & Book

Many students struggle with learning to read. Struggling readers need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. To provide this, teachers often need carefully crafted materials. Reading Elephant is dedicated to offering the most essential systematic phonics materials. To target your student’s phonics weaknesses, it’s helpful to have access to a good word list. In this post, I’m sharing a silent e word list and a silent e phonics book.

By word list, in this context, I mean a word bank wherein you, the teacher, can select words for instruction. Here is the free silent e word list or word bank for teachers:

Silent e Word List

The best silent e word list for students

Word lists help students learn to read sound-by-sound. In essence, they help students develop decoding skills. By presenting students with a list, you take away their crutches: their tendency to look at the pictures or guess at the words based on context.

There are a couple aspects that make a good word list for students. To start, you need to create a word list with about 20 words. For very beginning readers, make a list of 10 words and have your student read the 10 words in two separate 5 word activities. Aside from very beginning readers (who are learning to read hat, cat, met…etc.), stick with 20 words. Thus, in general, to create the best silent e word list, write down 20 words.

Also, use interleaving. What is interleaving? In interleaved lessons, the teacher mixes old phonics sounds with the new phonics sound. In this way, the student doesn’t guess at the sound patterns. The student can’t predict what will come next, so she decodes sound-by-sound.

Sample silent e word list for students

Interleaved lessons get students out of the bad habit of guessing. It’s especially critical that the student can’t predict the vowel sound. The following list, for example, does NOT contain interleaving because the list exclusively contains the silent e pattern: date, bike, tote, poke. Instead, create a silent e word list with long and short vowels like the following:

1. dim
2. black
3. glide
4. bless
5. shell
6. crave
7. flat
8. bend
9. Dave
10. slash
11. dent
12. slip
13. wipe
14. hatch
15. trade
16. drag
17. brush
18. drove
19. witch
20. spine

Free silent e phonics book

Reading elephant offers systematic phonics books that guide struggling readers through the most common phonics sounds. As the teacher, you simply follow the phonics books series. A new sound pattern is introduced with each new set. Check out our phonics library.

When you teach phonics, you must present your student with phonics books or decodable texts. (Phonics books and decodable texts are the same thing.) These are books that exclusively contain phonics sounds that the student has worked on or is currently working on. In sum, phonics sounds the student has NOT learned are not fair game. Here is the free silent e book:

Silent e Book

If you like the free silent e book, please check out our systematic phonics books. Our phonics books allow students to systematically learn the code.