What it is. The five irregular letters have no family pattern, so each is learned on its own — and then the whole alphabet is checked.
Why our test works. This lesson is a diagnostic as much as a lesson. Asking the child to name the hard letter turns a vague sense of difficulty into a specific piece of information the teacher can act on, and children are surprisingly accurate about it.
Leans on. Lessons 2 and 3 — twenty-one of the twenty-six are already known.
Watch for. Circle what they circle. This is the list you reteach from for the rest of the term.
Form the five irregular letters, then write all 26 once so the teacher can see where each child is. The worked example is the one you build on the board: Teacher forms e, f, j, s and u one at a time — these share no family pattern, so each gets The class reads the teaching page printed at the top of the sheet — our own writing, so a child who was absent can still get the lesson.
You open by saying where this sits — what it follows and what it is part of — in one sentence, and then you give them the reason it matters, in your own words, for about ten seconds.
Then you do one yourself, building it on the board and leaving it up: Teacher forms e, f, j, s and u one at a time — these share no family pattern, so each gets its own moment. Then the whole alphabet goes up as a reference strip. The board copy is what they look back at when they stall, so it stays there for the whole lesson.
The We-do is the main whiteboard moment of the lesson — short answers, boards up on your signal, every child visible at once. Class writes the five tricky letters together. Then the teacher calls letters at random from anywhere in the alphabet and the class writes each one. If the answer is a whole sentence rather than a word, take it on the printed sheet instead, because a sentence written on a whiteboard is written once and destroyed.
They read the teaching page — printed at the top of today's sheet — with you, either read-aloud or FASE, never round robin. Stop at the worked example and let them look at it.
Exit directions in full, standing still, before anyone moves. Then they work alone: Write the whole alphabet a to z, once, on your best line. Circle any letter that felt hard.
You close on the exit direction — Name one letter you circled. — taken from every child before anyone stands, and then the line you want them to still have tomorrow: If I can write all twenty-six, I can write anything.
Circle what they circle. This is the list you reteach from for the rest of the term.