Drop the e Before -ing and -ed Word Search

MAKE has a silent E — children learned that back in the magic E puzzles. So what happens when -ing arrives? MAKEING looks wrong because it is wrong. The E steps aside, and MAKE becomes MAKING. It is the politest rule in English spelling: the E does its job, then quietly leaves when a vowel suffix turns up to do it instead.

This word search contains fifteen words where the silent E has been dropped before -ing or -ed. It is designed for Year 2 and Year 3 pupils who know the split digraph pattern, and for second grade readers in the US, connecting directly back to the magic E puzzles earlier in the series. Larger grid, words left-to-right and top-to-bottom only.

MAKING · RIDING · BAKING · HOPING · LIKING · COMING · GIVING · HAVING · LIVING · TAKING · NAMED · BAKED · HOPED · LIKED · USING

Why the E must go

The magic E had one job: keep the vowel long. But -ing starts with a vowel of its own, and that I can hold the door open just as well — in MAKING, the A still says its name, with the I of -ing doing the work the E used to do. Two letters doing one job is one letter too many, so the E retires. The rule, in child-sized words: if the suffix brings its own vowel, the E goes home.

This is also the puzzle where the previous one pays off. HOPING sits in this grid; HOPPING sat in the last. One is HOPE minus its E; the other is HOP plus a bodyguard. The pair is the single best test of whether a child has both rules or is guessing — which is why the activities below keep shoving the two words together.

Five words to get right

1. MAKING is MAKE from the magic E puzzle, promoted. Write MAKE, cross out the E with a flourish, add ING. Ask your child to confirm the A still says its name. The crossing-out is the lesson — let them do it themselves, dramatically.
2. COMING is the one adults get wrong. COMEING appears in grown-up writing constantly. Show your child the wrong version and let them mark it with a red pen. Correcting adults is irresistible, and the correct form is theirs forever after.
3. HOPING must face HOPPING. Write both. Ask which one wishes and which one jumps — and which puzzle each came from. Two rules in one minute, told apart by one letter.
4. GIVING and HAVING are quiet rule-breakers. Their base words GIVE and HAVE never had long vowels — the E was only there because English refuses to end words in V. The E still drops. A rule that holds even for oddballs is a rule worth trusting.
5. NAMED belongs to your child. Have them write “I was NAMED …” with their own name finishing the sentence. The word that mattered most in the a_e puzzle still matters most here.

Three ways to retire the E

As a cross-out ceremony. Write five magic E bases on the board — MAKE, RIDE, BAKE, USE, TAKE — and have children come up one at a time to cross out the E and add ING, announcing the rule as they do: “the suffix brings its own vowel!” Mildly theatrical, completely memorable, and the board ends up displaying the whole grid’s logic.

As a three-pile sort in pairs. Mix word cards from the last three puzzles — JUMPING, RUNNING, MAKING and friends — and have pairs sort them into no-change, doubled, and dropped-E piles. Then the hard question: how did they tell? By the base word, every time. Sorting across rules is what turns three lessons into one system.

One-to-one at home. For homeschooling families: make five flip cards — base word on the front (HOPE, RIDE, BAKE, LIKE, USE), suffixed form on the back. Your child predicts the spelling out loud, then flips to check. Tomorrow, shuffle and run them again the other way round, back to front. Prediction before checking is what makes a flip card teach rather than merely test.

What comes next

• Comparatives: -er and -est word search — bigger, faster, tallest: the arguing suffixes
• Doubling the consonant word search — the previous puzzle in the suffix set
• All spelling word searches — the full series from foundation phonics to Year 6

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