I learned my first spelling rule from Ms. Ferguson, who was my Grade 1 teacher at Tecumseh Elementary school in London, Canada.

My classmates and I were frequently confused about spelling words like niece and piece and sometimes we would spell those words incorrectly: peice or neice, for example. So Ms. Ferguson taught us the simple rule — spell ‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’. The mneumonic helped me too!

As always, there are some exceptions to this rule, I imagine, because language learning is full of exceptions — there are in fact more exceptions than rules!

But the above spelling rule is a good one and can be helpful.

Enjoy!