Are there any ‘rules’ you use to teach students which grapheme they should use eg. ee in sleep not ea, or igh in high not ie? My year 1 students don’t have enough exposure or understanding of what looks right.

Let's think about patterns or generalisation rather than rules. (If you teach rules, then you have to teach too many exceptions to rules!) Some patterns/generalisations could be:

• ff ll ss zz - always preceded by short vowels in a single syllable word
• le at the end of words - short vowel, double consonant le in a 2 syllable word

With long vowels teach common places the grapheme falls within a word. It is more than just...