Word Families

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73.Noah loved the fact that some vowels had changed their sound because we felt it was easier for our mouths to move that way. He knew that everyone could understand that we say words differently just because we are lazy.

74.He wanted to make a lazy rule. But Ann said that first they needed to make some more specific rules. They would focus on the different amounts of laziness in our pronunciations. She asked Bob to start with a Word Family Rule.

75.Fat Rat said, “I’m not lazy, I’m just confused. Could somebody make up a story to help me remember the Word Families?”

76.So they told him the following tale.

77.Noah Webster used to have a huge yard and he loved to throw gigantic parties. He always invited the most interesting guests he could find.

78.When he started working on the first dictionary for America he kept running into Closed-syllable words that should have sleeping vowels in them. But those vowels would wake up and change their sound when they were with certain consonants.

79.He thought that if a couple of consonants could wake up sleeping vowels, they must be very interesting. So he threw a party and invited all of the words that used these spellings which made the vowels wake up, even though they were in Closed-syllables.

80.At first, everybody mingled together. Then Noah had them play a game where they had to get into groups. These groups were related by the vowels they used. Webster called these groups Word Families.

81.There was the O family, the I family, the EW family, the AW family and the Ink/Ing families. (Ink and Ing liked each other so much that they stayed together as one family.)

82.They tried to make a picture for Webster to remember them all by, but the crowd was too big. So each family decided to have a few words represent them in the picture.