With the BEGINNER Letter E videos we are introducing upper and lower case E, as well as three sounds, the long E vowel sound you hear when the letter E is talked about (we mark this with an upper case E since that is the sound the letter e makes when by itself, and it will often be seen in upper case form at the start of a sentence), and the short e vowel sound (we mark with a lower case e) you hear in our keyword bed. We also introduce the long E grapheme, ee from bee, and the ir grapheme from bird. The ir in bird is tricky as it has no e in it, despite making an er sound. This is the first time on the BEGINNER Truphonics course that we have introduced a grapheme that seems to have no relation to the letter being taught or the sound it should make. Fear not! Young students are highly flexible and can handle the rather poorly designed English phonetic system!

There is a video about going to bed, an animal dance, a body-touching Me song, songs about bees and birds, and a sung version (not too scary) of the famous fairy tale Sleeping Beauty (for the long ee sound in sleep!). The word elephant seems to come up a lot, which students will know, but it is a really hard word to spell, so we are focusing on our three champion words for BEGINNER level e, bee, bird and bed. Fairy tales are a great intro to western culture and fantastic for students' listening and pronunciation, even if they don't understand every word in the story (the visuals and prior knowledge help a lot!). There is also a video to teach the writing of the e letter!