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# When adding suffixes to words that end in an e, how do we teach students when the e goes away and when it stays?

| When adding suffixes to words that end in an e, how do we teach students when the e goes away and when it stays?**trickier**

In words such as **see** and **be**, the e at the end of the word is actively making the sound /ee/, so when we add suffixes to these words, the e stays.

E.g. see + ing = seeing

|| Silent e
|| In other words, the e at the end is helping rather than making the sound, so we call it a silent e. For example:
* **Make,** the e is helping the a say its long sound /ay/. 
* **Face**, the e is helping the c say its soft sound /s/. 
* **Edge**, the e is helping the g say its soft sound /j/. 
* **Leave**, the e is helping the v as a v does not like to be at the end of a word alone.
* **Pause**, the e is helping the s say its noisy sound /z/.

When we add a suffix starting with a vowel to these words with a silent e, the e goes away before we add the suffix.

E.g. make + ing = making        edge = ing = edging        pause + ing = pausing

|| Tricky words
One other group of words is a little trickier. In words such as glue, the e is part of a digraph and so is not silent. When we add ing, the e stays, but if we add ed, we cannot have two e’s, so the e must go away.

E.g. glue + ing = glueing                 glue +ed = glued