Which method would best help a student understand the correct usage of the grapheme ea in words like unhealthy and healed?

• A. Discussing rhyming words such as bread, dead, head, and health, and about how sometimes the letters ea make the short vowel sound
• B. Talking about the relationship of the two misspelled words, both sharing the meaning of the root word heal, and that morphemes have consistent spellings in word families despite the vowel pronunciation variation
• C. Recognizing that the student attempted to spell the words correctly and accepting the phonetic spelling as the assignment was not graded for spelling
• D. Asking the student to look up the words in the dictionary and write their correct spellings with definitions in a vocabulary journal

Answer: (B)

Understanding how the letters ea function across related words comes from looking at root meaning and word families, not just how the sound changes. When students see words like healed and unhealthy, they can notice that the ea part is tied to a root idea about healing or health. The important idea is that morphemes—the meaningful parts of a word—toster remain spelled the same across related forms, even when the pronunciation shifts in different words. So teaching students to connect the spelling of ea to the root heal/health helps them predict and apply the correct spelling in new words, because the pattern stays consistent within the word family.

This method is especially effective here because it links meaning and structure: it shows why the same letter sequence appears in related words and how that spelling helps carry the core idea across forms. Other approaches focus mainly on how the letters sound in isolation, which can mislead when pronunciations vary between root words and their derivatives, or rely on dictionary lookup without building a lasting sense of how spelling reflects morphology.