Word Garden
Here are some open booklets in another region of the Word Garden—this time not one that’s unusually productive. In the top row, you see a good example of why this particular prototype might be useful for teacher education or older children, but is too advanced for true beginners. The fully open booklet shows the leap students have to make, beginning around third grade, as they tackle Latin-derived vocabulary.
The "dashed flashed crashed" page exemplifies a common pattern, final consonant blends that depend on inflectional morphology. Quite a lot of derivational morphology shows up in the booklets as well.
The pronunciation of some words varies, so any system that sorts by sound also requires flexibility and annotation. Within the booklets, I’ve marked a few words with asterisks as a reminder of this. For instance, “roof” rhymes with “hoof” for some speakers of English, and not for others. Homographs are also marked (with a superscript “2”), and can show up in more than one booklet.
Finally, amongst long vowels, morphology often crosses syllable boundaries. It seems logical to list “riding” and “bridal” in the same booklet as “ride” and “bride.” What about “spider” and “idle”? My current plan is to list them in the same booklet, but possibly with letter spacing that emphasizes the open syllable, showing a break after the vowel. The open vowel booklets might be extra fat, with a long list of duplicate words, to help underscore that pattern for the long vowels.