Why I Made That Video

I've been noticing it for a while — kids who are behind on reading, parents who don't always know what to look for or how to help, and a real gap between "my child struggles to read" and understanding why. I made a TikTok this week talking directly to parents about it: reading isn't something kids either "get" or don't — it's a skill built on specific, learnable patterns, and when those patterns are taught explicitly, reading stops feeling like guesswork.

A day later, this landed in my inbox: FDA... no, sorry — the actual literacy world had already been building toward the exact same message, official enough that there's now a National Day for it.

What National Silent E Day Actually Is

September 29 is the first National Silent E Day, declared by the National Day Calendar® Registrar. It was founded by Stacey Roselli, a Structured Literacy Specialist, Reading Interventionist, and founder of The Reading Village — an educational organization she started in 2014 serving students from kindergarten through high school. She's also served as Vice President of the International Dyslexia Association's Florida Branch.

The day exists to celebrate one small, unglamorous letter that does more work than most people realize: the silent e at the end of a word. It makes no sound of its own, but it quietly runs the English language behind the scenes.

The Four Jobs of a Silent E

What that one letter is actually doing

  • ① The Vowel Transformer. It turns short vowel sounds into long ones — cap becomes cape, kit becomes kite.
  • ② The "V" Companion. English words almost never end in the letter v on its own, so silent e steps in as a partner — have, give.
  • ③ The Sound Softener. Placed after a c or g, it softens the hard consonant sound — the hard c in "cap" becomes the soft c in peace.
  • ④ The Word Anchor. It prevents confusion with plural endings and makes sure every written syllable keeps the vowel it needs.

As Roselli put it: "When children understand the rules and patterns behind our written language, reading stops feeling like random guessing and starts feeling like solving a puzzle." That's the entire point of structured literacy instruction, and it's the same thing I was trying to say to parents in my video — kids who "can't read" are very often kids who were never taught the actual pattern behind what they're looking at.

Why this matters beyond one novelty day: a genuinely rising number of kids are hitting later grades without solid reading fundamentals. Days like this one won't fix that on their own, but they put a spotlight — and a shareable, teachable moment — on a real, ongoing problem. If one silly-sounding "holiday" gets one more parent to ask "wait, how does this actually work?", it did its job.

How to Take Part on September 29

  • Play & win — the official National Silent E Day website has literacy games, learning competitions, and prize raffles.
  • Community events — check for reading events and story times at participating public libraries and Barnes & Noble locations.
  • Show support — Silent E-themed activities in the classroom, or just talk through a few silent-e word transformations with your own kid (cap→cape, kit→kite, hat→hate are easy starting points).
  • Join the conversation — share it on social media with #NationalSilentEDay.

I'll be doing a follow-up on TikTok tying this back to the literacy video I posted this week — if you saw that one, this is the "and here's proof I'm not the only one saying it" follow-up.