The Double L Challenge

This was a really fun activity to kick off our Word Inquiry block! I did this with the Plastic Utensils, age 10-11.

First, I gave the challenge a backstory. Many years ago, when we moved to this house, my daughter carefully packed up all of her favorite shells from our little log cabin by the Chesapeake Bay and wrote SHELS on the box.

Inspired by that sweet mis-spelling, I had an idea.

Could the children come up with two lists of words ended in the / l / sound, sort them into a group that DID end in < ll > and a group that did NOT end in < ll >, and find some kind of pattern?

In Structured Word Inquiry (SWI), we try to avoid the word "rule" and instead say "convention," when we talk about spelling, because there can sometimes be exceptions. Exceptions are, however, very rare.

So, what spelling convention governs when we use a < ll > to represent the / l / sound at the end of a word in English?

They had a great time doing this!

We ended up deciding that the convention seemed to be

The children noted that the sound of a in < Sal > and < Al > and < gal > is different than the sound of a in < ball > and < fall > and < call >, so the double l spelling seems to indicate which vowel sound to use in the pronunciation of the word.

I thought it very clever to take a word that IS spelled with a double l, and remove one of the l's, and see what happens to the pronunciation!

The Capybaras (age 12-13) got interested in the project and came over to join in the brainstorm. They both gave this a lot of thought and figured out two exceptions to our convention! The 12 year old found a word that seemed to end in < ll > and not be preceeded by a short vowel sound spelled by only one letter (quill). The 13 year old found a word that ended in a single l but seemed to have a short vowel sound spelled by only one letter before it.

This is where the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) comes in handy, and we will be talking about it more with our Linquistics special guest on Tuesday, Dr. Jeffrey Punske.

In < quill >, the letters in < qu > actually work together as a blend, and so it doesn't really "count" as two vowels side by side when you see the < ui > spelling.

< Quill > in IPA is

/kwɪl/

In < Portugal >, the a is a schwa, so it is a neutral vowel and not a short vowel.

< Portugal > in IPA is

/ˈpɔːr.tʃə.ɡəl/

The older children are really excited to learn how to spell their names in IPA! Dr. Punske will also add a deeper layer to my brief overview of the history of the English language by explaining the Great Vowel Shift.

If you're interested in IPA, I recommend the online Cambridge English Dictionary. It is always shown as part of the dictionary entry.

P.S. I just though of < shovel >. It has the schwa and a single l at the end. It also is a two-syllable word (as is Portugal). The children didn't get as far as thinking of single syllable versus multiple syllable words, so we may circle back around to the < ll > challenge and raise that new question!