About this activity
The twelve medial /g/ words — wagon, tiger, bigger, foggy, sugar, iguana, yogurt, seagull, wiggle, finger, magnet, buggy — as a spelling task. Derived from the flashcard deck, and the spellings are genuinely varied: some double the g, some do not, and finger has an n before it that changes the sound slightly without changing the letter.
How to use it in a session
Say the word, split it into syllables aloud, then build it. Every word here is two syllables, so the syllable break is worth naming — bug-gy and wag-on divide in different places relative to the g, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes multisyllabic spelling hard. Keep asking for the production between letters.
What to listen for
Watch the doubling. Bigger, foggy, wiggle and buggy all double the g after a short vowel; wagon, tiger, sugar and seagull do not. That is a real and teachable pattern, and a student who spots it has something that works on words far beyond these twelve. Notice sugar, which starts with an s that sounds like /sh/ — an unrelated irregularity that will distract from the target.
Carrying it home
Ask whether a word has one g or two. Tiger against bigger is a good pair to try, and the answer follows from the vowel sound before it, which is a rule a child can actually apply.
Questions
- How is this different from the flashcards?
- Same twelve words, built from letters rather than read. The doubling pattern makes it worth doing with a student working on spelling as well as speech.
- Do I need an account?
- No, it plays free in the browser.
- When does the g double?
- After a short vowel — bigger, foggy, wiggle, buggy. After a long vowel or a different sound it stays single, as in tiger and sugar. It is a reliable enough pattern to teach directly.