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Slides 3-5: Facts and Key Functions

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Check out this Presentation designed by Sage Maydew.

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The Reading Brain: this video is informative but doesn't bombard you with information.

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The Science of Reading Basics, Part 1: The Reading Brain

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Phonemes: the smallest units of sound in a language that can be distinguished from one word from another.

Ex. the difference between the words "bat" & "cat" is the phonemes /b/ vs /k/

Phoneme Count: English has 42-44 phonemes, yes there are 26 letters in the alphabet. This is because some letters represent more than one sound. Some sounds are also represented by combinations of letters.

Ex. "c" in "cat" vs "city"

Ex. "th" in "thin"

Categories of Phonemes

Vowel Phonemes (about 18): sounds produced without any significant constriction or blockage of airflow in the vocal tract.

Ex. /a/ as in "cat"

Consonant Phonemes (about 25): sounds produced with some degree of constriction or closure in the vocal tract.

Ex. /p/ as in "pat"

Parts of Consonant Phonemes

Voicing: refers to whether or not the vocal cords vibrate during the production of a constant sound. (Voiced: occurs when the vocal cords vibrate ex. /b/, /d/, /g/)(Voiceless: Occurs when the vocal cords do not vibrate ex. /p/, /t/, /k/)

Place of Articulation: refers to the location of the vocal tract where the airflow is constricted to produce a constant sound. Ex. Bilabial: both lips touching, Alveolar: the tongue touches the alveolar ridge, Velar: the back of the tongue touches the soft part of the roof of the mouth.

Manner of Articulation: refers to how the airflow is modified as it goes through the vocal tract. Ex. Plosive: complete closure of airflow with a release, Fricative: partial blockage (creates friction), Nasal: airflow is directed through the nose.

Grapheme: letters or letter combinations used to represent spoken sounds

Phonics Instruction involves teaching the relationship between sounds and the spelling used to represent them.

Syllable: a word or part of a word pronounced as a unit.

Onset: The part of the syllable that comes before the vowel.

Rime: The vowel and everything after it.

Phonograms: a nonlinguistic term sometimes used in place of 'rime'

Morphemes: The smallest units of meaning in language

Types of Morphemes

Free morphemes: can stand alone as words (ex. book, run)

Bound Morphemes: cannot stand alone and must be attached to other morphemes (ex. -s in books, un- in undo).

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This section was beneficial regarding the brain. I did learn new information as about it and how we use parts of the brain together to learn to read and comprehend.

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Slide 7: KSDE ELA Standards

Slide 8: Becoming aware of print video

Slide 9: Concepts of print

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Print Awareness: refers to a child's understanding that print carries meaning and that it is used in everyday contexts like books, signs, and labels.

Its is often considered the first step towards reading.

Print awareness is foundational for reading and writing development.

It helps children recognize that print represents spoken language and that there is a connection between written and spoken words.

Components of Print Awareness

Recognizing Print in the Environment:

Understanding that print is everywhere (books, signs, labels, and menus)

Understanding the Functions of Print:

Knowing that print has a purpose, such as telling a story, providing information, or giving directions

Print Directionality

Recognizing the left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequence of reading English text

Understanding Letters and Words

Differentiating between letters, words, and sentences

Understanding that spaces separate words

Development of Print Awareness

Stages of Development

Infant/Toddlers: Exposure to print through shared reading experiences.

Preschoolers: Beginning to notice and ask about letters and words in their environment.

Kindergarteners: Developing a more refined understanding of print functions and directionality

Influencing Factors

Home Environment: Availability of books, exposure to reading.

Teacher Interaction: Classroom print-rich environment read-aloud.

Strategies for Teaching Print Awareness

Interactive Read-Aloud

Point out print elements during read-aloud sessions (e.g. tracking text with a finger, discussing punctuation)

Labeling the Classroom

Label objects in the classroom (e.g. "door", "window", "bookshelf") to help children connect written words with objects.

Print-Rich Enviorment

Create a classroom environment full of print (posters, charts, word walls) to encourage print recognition.

Shared Writing

Engage in shared writing activities where the teacher models writing and involves students in composing text together.

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Print Awareness Sample

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Print Awareness, this is something I have never really thought about but it is straightforward. In class, we discussed how even having things labeled in your classroom such as counter, sink, and desk. These are all ways that can help with print awareness. Parents can also help engage this, in the video the mom associates an item at the store with a letter/word. This is so simple to help engage, there are also small assessments that can be done so see how kids are doing with their print awareness.

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Book pages:

Chart on 85

86-88

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Letter Knowledge: Refers to a student's overall knowledge of letter names, shapes, sounds, and formation

26 uppercase letters, 26 lowercase letters

Relationship between letter shapes and letter names is not straightforward. Students must memorize this information.

Handwriting can and does reinforce this skill set.

Letter-name Iconicity: when the name of a letter conations the sound that the letter represents

There are only two totally noniconic letter names: w &h

According to researchers Treiman (2005) and Share (2004), it is easier for students to learn a particular letter-sound correspondence if the letter's sound happens to be in the letter's name.

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Letter Knowledge Sample Assignment

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Letter knowledge, from what I am getting, is essentially how well a student knows their letters/ how familiar they are with the sound and identification of letters. The Ah-Ha moment for me was an assessment that can be done to test their letter knowledge. I didn't know there was an test that can be done.

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Salad Lesson and other sample lessons on/ around page 138

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Phonological Awareness

An overall awareness of the sounds in spoken language (auditory)

Ability to think about and recognize larger chunks in words

Ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words

Includes phonemic awareness (the ability to recognize and manipulate individual sounds)

Phoneme: the smallest unit of speech in the language

Skills begin in preschool

Early Phonological Awareness Skills

Early phonological awareness (Pre-k or K)

Counting words in sentences

Rhyming:

Recognition (lace/race, best/nest, plan/bike)

Odd word our (cake, corn, shake)

Production (a word that rhymes with man)

Syllables:

Counting (crick-et [2], e-ra-ser [3])

Blending (ta+ble= table)

Segmenting (football = foot and ball)

Adding (pill, add /ō/ = pillow)

deletion (cupcake without cup = cake)

Phonological Awareness Information

Early phonological awareness (Pre-k or K)

Alliteration:

words that begin with the same sounds (lazy Lindsey like Licorice)

Initial (first) sounds:

Isolating first sounds (clap /c/, jump /j/, zipper /z/)

Onset-Rime: c*ake, w*ave, d*esk, ch*air, fl*at

Onset = letter(s) before vowel

Rime = the vowel & everything that follows

blending (l + eaf = leaf, ch + at = chat)

segmenting (cake = /c/ and /ape/, brick = /br/ and /ick/)

adding (ake, add /f/ = fake, ash add /fl/ = flash)

deletion (mice without /m/ = ice, joke without /j/ = oke)

substitution (d-en change /d/ to /p/ =p-en

Phonological Awareness cont.

From the National Reading Panel Report

Clearly affects students' achievement in phonemic awareness, reading, and spelling

Pre-K, K, and 1st graders, as well as older, disabled readers, benefit from phonological instruction

5 to 10 minutes DAILY (more is not better)

Instruction should be explicit

Knowledge of letter names, letter sounds, and letter shapes is essential and supports the development of phonological awareness

Tailor instruction according to what students know and can do

Small group instruction provides the most effective instructional environment

No single best way or program for teaching phonological awareness

Phonemic Awareness

Phon = sound

words:

Phoneme

Phonics

Phonetics

Phonogram

Phonogram

Phonology

Phonological

What is a Phoneme?

Phoneme

Phon = sound

eme = unit of language structure

A phoneme is the smallest segment of speech

Phonemic Awareness

the conscious awareness of individual speech sounds, or phonemes, (consonants and vowels) in spoken syllables (auditory)

a phoneme is the smallest segment of speech in a language system that can determine word meaning, or that can be combined with other speech sounds to make a new word

stop, pots, post

rich /r/ /ĩ/ /j/

Ability to consciously manipulate those sounds

i=Individual sounds are represented between / / symbols

/k/, /sh/, /dge/

Long vowels /ā/ /ē/ /ī/ /ō/ /ū/ and Short Vowels /ǎ/ /ě/ /ǐ/ /ǒ/ /ǔ/

Example Phonemic Awareness Skills

Isolate (what is the first/final/medial sound in fish)

Categorize (which work has a different first/final/medial sound)

Blending phonemes (/c/ /ã/ /t/ = met)

Segmenting phonemes (chat= /ch/ /a/ /t/)

Counting (each [2] = /ē/ /ch/ ; chop [3] /ch/ /o/ /p/)

Adding phonemes (jump, add /s/ - jumps; oats, add /c/ to beginning - coats)

Deleting phonemes (sleep without /s/; couch without the /ch/)

Substituting phonemes (chose - change /ch/ to /th/)

Phoneme chains (lap- map - tap -tack)

Reversing phonemes (cat - flip flop the first and last sound = tack)

What does this mean for students?

Someone who is phonemically aware knows that:

Sentences can be broken into words

Spoken words can be broken into parts

Sounds in an alphabetic language can be rearranged for use in a wide variety of words

The order of the sounds in words matter (stop means something quite different than spot or pots or tops)

Why spend time on this?

English has 44 phonemes but only 26 letters

Whole class instruction including phonemic awareness training is one of the best antidotes for futures reading failure; however, instruction must be linked to explicit phonics instruction (letter-sound correspondences) to benefit young readers

Having phonemic awareness helps students engage without written language so they can more easily:

Learn to read (sound-symbol; decoding)

Spell (phonetic or invented spelling; encoding)

PA is the aspect of phonological awareness that is most closely related to reading and spelling

Learn to read (sound-symbol; decoding)

Spell (phonetic or invented spelling; encoding)

Developing this skill

Research studies have found that phonemic awareness can be taught & developed in young children

How is this best achieved?

using activities that are child-appropriate, deliberate, and purposeful

phonemic awareness should be PART of a fuller literacy program - should not be the only thing done

National reading panel (NRP) suggested 20 hours during the school year (a few minutes per day, several days per week)

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YouTube video: Teacher demonstrating phonemic awareness

YouTube video: Elkonin Boxes

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Phonological Awareness is so easy to squeeze in. There is little to no prep required and many activities can be thrown into the mix. It is easy to throw in and helps benefit future generations.

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Youtube video: Letters vs Phonemes

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Phonics, this term is used in several different ways and refers to:

the system of phoneme-grapheme (sound-symbol) correspondences that are the basic structure of an alphabetic orthography;

a strategy necessary for decoding new words and for storing those words in orthographic memory; or

an essential component of effective reading instruction - one of the five big ideas or pillars that should be addressed by effective reading programs.

Decoding

The ability to translate a word from print to speech using sound-symbol (phoneme-grapheme) correspondences

Can be in or out of context

Phoneme: the smallest unit of speech sound

Grapheme: represents a phoneme

Orthography: a writing system for representing language

English orthography has many patterns and constraints that help to speed the decoding process up

/k/: kiss or click

The letter x is never doubled

English words do not end in the letter v

Graphemes (consonants)

a grapheme is the letter(s) that represent a single phoneme (sound)

the grapheme (or letter) k represents the phoneme (or sound) /k/

grapheme m = phoneme /m/

grapheme t = phoneme /t/

grapheme l = phoneme /l/

consonant blend: two or three graphemes, each one representing a phoneme and maintaining their own sounds (before OR after the vowel sound in a syllable)

the graphemes (or letters) c-l represent the sound /c/ /l/ or /cl/ (clean)

grapheme s-t-r = phonemes /s/ /t/ /r/ or /str/ (stream)

grapheme l-k = phonemes /l/ /k/ or /lk/ (milk)

consonant diagraphs: one grapheme comprised of two letters that together represent one phoneme (before Or after the vowel sound in a syllable)

Note: digraphs can make a unique sound such as /sh/ or be another spelling for a single-consonant letter such as ph or f)

the grapheme (or letters) ch represents the phoneme (or sound) /ch/

grapheme sh = phoneme /sh/ (shut)

grapheme th = phoneme /th/ (throw) OR phoneme /th/ (that)

grapheme ck = phoneme /k/ (pick)

grapheme gh = phoneme /g/ (rough)

consonant trigraphs: one grapheme comprised of three letters that together represent one phoneme (after a short vowel sound at the end of the syllable)

the grapheme (or letters) tch represents the phoneme (or sound) /ch.

grapheme dge = phoneme /j/ (pledge)

Orthographic Mapping

proficient word reading requires rapid recognition of all relevant layers of word structure in a mental process called orthographic mapping (Kilpatrick, 2015)

the more students learn about the structure of words, the better they will be able to read them independently, the more readily they will process their meanings, and the more they will understand and remember about spelling (Moats, 2019)

to accurately and automatically read the word unkind, the brain will need to recognize:

syllables: un-kind [2]

morphemes: un-kind [2]

graphemes: u-n-k-i-n-d [6]

phonemes: /u/ /n/ /k/ /i/ /n/ /d/ [6]

parts of speech: adjective [describe the noun]

Phoneme: the smallest unit of speech sound (can be combined with other phonemes in a language to make words, represented between / /)

Grapheme: a letter or letter combination that spells a phoneme (can be one, two, three, or four letters in English)

Two approaches to phonics Instruction

synthetic approach (aka code-based, direct, systematic, or explicit phonics)

follow a bottom-up model

typical sequence

letter name taught

sound-letter stands for taught & received (some rules or generalizations might be discussed)

Principle of blending sounds to form words is taught

Opportunities to blend unknown words in context are provided (decodable texts)

Two approaches go phonics instructions cont.

referred to as the "discovery method" (does not follow Science of Reading)

Meaning-emphasis programs

students begin with words & are asked to deduct the sound-spelling relationship that is the focus of the lesson

typical sequence:

List of words with common phonic elements (focus on similar sounds)

asked to examine the words & discover what they have in common (focus on similar sound)

when common sound is discovered, the spelling for that sound might be discussed

verbalize a generalization about the sound and spelling (e.g. letter s stands for /s/ sound

Phonics cont.

report of National Reading Panel (2000)

Congressional mandate to identify key skills central to reading achievement

reviewed 100,000 studies using strict criteria of evidence (scientifically based review)

Identified the "big five" blocks of reading

Phonemic awareness

phonics

fluency

vocabulary

comprehension

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently. Students can complete the activities in small groups, pairs, or individually.

Accompanying these Student Center Activities is a Teacher Resource Guide that offers important insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

Component

Name of the reading component: Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonics (P), Fluency (F), Vocabulary (V), or Comprehension (C). Each component is color coded: PA is purple, P is orange, F is red, V is green, C is blue.

Subcomponent

Name of the reading subcomponent, which is a subskill of the component.

Activity Name

Activity Number

The letters correspond with the reading component (PA, P, F, V, or C). The numbers are listed in ascending order within each component. The activities are sequenced from simple to more complex within each component and subcomponent.

Student Icon

The suggested number of students for the activity. One student icon indicates that students may work independently or with a small group. Two student icons indicate that the activity requires students to work in pairs. Two student icons with a plus sign indicate that the activity requires two or more students.

Objective

States the goal of the activity, which is aligned with the subcomponent.

Materials

Materials are located on the pages that follow the Activity Plan. Most materials are non-consumable to be prepared and used repeatedly (e.g., word cards can be laminated). Some materials are consumable and will need to be duplicated for each student doing the activity. Other materials, such as counters, are commonly found in most classrooms.

Activity Statement

One sentence explanation of the purpose of the activity and what students do to complete the activity.

Activity Steps

The first step describes how to setup the center. The second step begins with: The student, Students, Working in pairs, or Taking turns depending on the number of students needed to complete the activity. The second step also starts the series of steps to complete the activity. The next steps explain what the student does to complete the activity. The last step lists one of three accountability methods: Self-check, Peer evaluation, or Teacher evaluation.

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

Suggestions that extend or provide an adaptation for additional practice on the skill addressed in the activity. Materials for the extensions and adaptations are included after the pages that align to the Activity Plan.

Users may use the FCRR Student Center Activities resources as long as modifications are not made, the resources will only be used for non-profit educational purposes, and the copyright belong jointly to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research. These resources may not be used for any commercial purposes. These resources on our site may be linked to but not reposted, reproduced, modified, or copied to other sites. For questions about the use of these resources, please contact The Florida Center for Reading Research at fcrr@fcrr.org.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently.

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My biggest takeaway from this section would be that this kind of builds off of Phonological awareness, except this is the breakdown of words and putting those sounds to the works and each letter and how they go together to make the word.

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Irregular Word Reading

"Not all words are regular or can be read by sounding them out. An irregular word contains one or more sounds/spelling correspondence that a student does not know and therefore cannot decode the word. Because students can't sound out irregular words by applying their phonics knowledge, they have to learn to identify these words as a whole, or automatically by sight. Many of the most common (i.e. high frequency) words in English are irregular"

"Temporarily irregular words may be irregular at one point in a beginning reading program but may eventually become regular after all the sound/spellings in the word have been taught. In other words, as students learn more sound/spelling, some of the irregular words that they learned by sight become wholly decodable words.

"The more difficult an irregular word, the more practice is necessary. There are two factors that determine the difficulty of an irregular word: (1) the number of irregularities in the pronunciation of its sound/spelling correspondences and (2) whether or not the word is in a student's oral vocabulary."

Sequence of Introduction

"Word frequency: introduce high-frequency irregular words before low-frequency irregular words. If too many irregular words appear in an upcoming story, prioritize by teaching only the words that are more likely to appear in future reading"

"Word Similarity: some pairs of irregular words are frequently confused by students, such as of-off, their-there, and were-where. These pairs of words should not be introduced too close to each other. Introducing the second potentially confusing word at a later time allows students to master the first irregular word."

"Word Relationship: Some pairs of irregular words belong to the same word family; they contain similar letter patterns or phonograms. Irregular words that have a phonogram in common, such as could, should, and would, should be introduced in sets."

"Decoding is a highly reliable strategy for identifying regular words, but irregular words do not always conform to what is taught in phonics instruction.

"When to Teach: Irregular words need to be systematically introduced in a reasonable order, practiced, and then cumulatively reviewed."

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Word banks and word walls

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These words are ones we don't even think about. "There, of, the, was, are". I would never think of these as being irregular because they are so common, and they are just memorized by sound and spelling. It's eye-opening thinking about someone looking at the word "of" and thinking it is pronounced /o/ /f/.

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Decoding Multi-Syllabic Words episode 11

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Syllabication: is the division of a multisyllabic word into separate syllables, with each syllable containing one vowel sound. A syllable may contain more than one vowel letter, but the letters will represent only one vowel sound.

There are basically three different research-based approaches to teaching students how to decode longer multisyllabic words.

1) using syllable types and division principles

2) identifying affixes or word parts

3) using flexible syllabication strategies

Common types of syllables

Closed: a syllable ending in one or more consonants and having a short vowel sound spelling with one vowel sound. VC, CVC< CCVC,CVCC

Open: a syllable ending with a long vowel sound spelled with one vowel letter. CV, CCV

Vowel Combination: a syllable with a short vowel, long vowel, or diphthong sound spelled with a vowel combination, such as ai, ea, ee, oi, or oo. CVVC, CCVVC, CVVCC

R- Controlled: A syllable containing a letter combination made up of a vowel followed by the letter r, such as ar, ir, or, and ur. The vowel-r combination is one welded sound that cannot be segmented.

Vowel-consonant e: a syllable with a long vowel sound spelled with one vowel letter followed by one consonant and a silent e. VCe, CVCe, CCVCe

Consonant-le: a final, separate syllable containing a consonant followed by the letters le.

Open and closed syllables make up almost 75% of syllables in English words. For this reason, Shefelbineing and Newman (2004) refer to these two types as "the basic building blocks of polysyllabic decoding".

Other syllable division principles

divide two-syllable compound words between the two smaller words (e.g., in.side, pan.cake)

inflectional endings such as -ing, -er, -es, -ed, and -est often from separate syllables

never separate the letters in a consonant or vowel digraph, vowel diphthong, or r-controlled vowel across syllable division

one of the syllables in a multisyllabic word usually receives more stress or emphasis. In two-syllable words, the stress usually falls on the first syllable (e.g., mo'ment, fa'mous). In the unstressed syllable, the vowel sound often is "reduced" to a schwa (e.g., we'gon, cac'tus)

Syllable divisions often occur between morphemic units of meaning-word parts. Word parts include root words, Greek and Latin roots, and affixes.

Morphemes: the meaningful parts or words

Suffixes: affixes that follow root words

Affixes: prefixes and suffixes

Prefixes: affixes that come before root words

Root words: (base word) a single word that cannot be broken into smaller meaningful words or parts

The syllable segmentation strategy involves breaking words into spoken syllables, matching the spoken syllables to their spellings, and then blending the segments to form a recognizable word.

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Many people have been talking about the need for phonics instruction, but most of these conversations come to a screeching halt after talking about instruction in basic decoding skills. Instruction in multisyllabic word reading, or teaching students to read words with more than one syllable, is a crucial bridge between basic phonics and fluent word reading. It is also a major stumbling block for older readers who are still working on foundational reading skills. How to practically teach students to read long words has also been largely left out of the national conversation on the science of reading.

Marissa Filderman and Jessica Toste, two university professors who research multisyllabic word reading interventions, joined us to discuss what we know about teaching students to read long words. Marissa is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and researches literacy interventions for students with and at risk for learning disabilities, with an emphasis on data-based decision-making. Jessica is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She focuses on effective interventions for students with and at risk for reading disabilities, as well as how to intensify interventions through data-based instruction.

Misconceptions in multisyllabic reading

As Marissa and Jessica note, there are several misconceptions about multisyllabic reading and how to approach teaching young children how to read longer, more difficult words.

The first misconception is that instruction should center primarily on syllables. Marissa recommends not getting too hung up on syllable rules because many of them "are very rigid and they don't always apply." For example, teaching students to divide a word with a VCV pattern (like pilot or travel) before the first consonant and pronouncing the first vowel as a long vowel only works about half the time, according to research on the usefulness of syllable division patterns by Devin Kearns. "It can be more confusing for a reader who already has a lot of difficulty with just decoding in general to also think about those rules," Marissa adds.

"There's also often a misconception that foundational reading instruction and knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and decoding skills translate automatically into multisyllabic word reading," Jessica says. But a young reader having a good grasp of the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes isn't enough.

Foundational reading skills, including phonics and word recognition, are critical but they are not enough on their own. Jessica explains that kids need to be helped in taking decoding to the next level: "Students really need to be taught, and students who struggle especially need to be taught-explicitly-how those skills scale up. They've been effective for them before. Now how can they use those skills to move from identifying and pronouncing individual letter sounds to identifying and pronouncing word parts to read more complex words? Students need this continued instruction as the words they are being exposed to become more complex and don't always follow the rules they've been practicing in previous instruction."

Another misconception is that foundational skills never need revisiting. That may be true for some students, but definitely not all. "There's a careful balance we have to find with ongoing foundational skills instruction," Jessica explains. For some students, "we need to continue to review vowel patterns and practice flexing vowel sounds while supporting students in decoding multisyllabic words. They need continued practice with those grapheme-phoneme correspondences so that they can apply them fluently and automatically every time they're reading a word."

Finally, there is sometimes confusion about the role of reading longer texts, as opposed to reading multisyllabic words in isolation. "It's important to always read connected text in reading instruction, to always move from isolated word reading to connected text, even if you only have time for a few sentences to read at the end of a lesson," Jessica advises.

6 ways to help kids with multisyllabic word reading

The following six strategies can help you approach multisyllabic word reading with your students:

1. Ensure students have prerequisite skills. The first step in approaching multisyllabic words with your students is to confirm they're ready for the added level of complexity. "Make sure students have prerequisite skills, that they know vowel sounds and consonant sounds, and that they can recognize most grapheme correspondences," Marissa says.

2. Focus on affixes. Marissa recommends explicitly teaching the pronunciation and meaning of affixes. "And continue to review all the affixes you've taught regularly," she adds. Teaching students to quickly identify and "peel off" prefixes and suffixes within words can help students begin to recognize both pronunciation and meaning of larger chunks as they encounter more unfamiliar words.

3. Practice chunking. Because syllable rules can be inconsistent and confusing, Marissa recommends chunking, either by using the vowel in a word or the morpheme. "Students might use the short or the long form of that vowel sound to read the word," Marissa says. Teachers can also help students chunk by using morphemes and affixes. "One of the most important things when focusing on multisyllabic words is really building morphological knowledge through breaking words into meaningful parts to make them easier to read," Marissa explains. The "peel off" strategy is useful when chunking, too.

4. Make a game of reading multisyllabic words. It's easy for multisyllabic reading instruction to get a little dry, so Marissa recommends getting playful. "After having structured practice with assembling and blending word parts to read multisyllabic words, I like to gamify this," she says. "Students can play with the words in a sort of game format that's fun, fast paced, and engaging. [...] Introduce a select number of base words you think might work in your particular instructional context. Have students attach or build onto those base words with prefixes or suffixes. Have them point and say each word part and then blend the word parts and say the whole word."

5. Move on to fluency when kids are ready. "For word reading fluency practice," Marissa advises, "I like to use targeted word lists until students get really comfortable. I recommend you focus on certain patterns that you want to work with in those word lists, or certain affixes. Your word list can become more complex as you go." Some of that playful approach she mentioned earlier can work well with fluency, too. "There can be a timed component of this practice as well, if that's helpful to students. Or you can have a tracking component where they track their own performance every time they read a word list and see if their fluency is improving over time."

6. Practice words in context. Just as Jessica noted, students need time to practice reading more than just isolated words. "Just like with any foundational skills instruction lesson, we always move from reading practice with words in isolation to words in connected text, and doing a lot of practice with connected text," Marissa says. "This can look like sentences where the affixes you're learning appear and multisyllabic words that you've been practicing move into passages as well."

Serving students well

The crucial bridge for students from basic phonics to fluent word reading often goes overlooked. Consider reaching out to your leaders for any additional support you might need for your students. I recommend the following:

Ensure your school has materials to help students read long words. The lessons Jessica uses in her research are available for free online, and they have been shown to be effective for older students who need more instruction in advanced word reading.

Request professional learning opportunities around advanced word reading, and job-embedded coaching to answer ongoing questions and help you strengthen your practice. NWEA offers a professional learning workshop titled "Grades K-5: Building Fluent Readers" that's a great place to start.

Explore assessment options. If older students are not meeting benchmarks on your school's reading comprehension assessment, consider using a follow-up assessment, like MAP® Reading Fluency™, that can help you better understand if students are struggling with word recognition or language comprehension. If students are having difficulty with word recognition in the upper grades, make sure their intervention addresses this in a systematic way.

Reading long words fluently opens the doors to a limitless world of learning opportunities through rich and complex texts for students. To hear more from Marissa and Jessica, watch our videos.

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6 strategies for teaching multisyllabic word reading - Teach. Learn. Grow.

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Instruction in multisyllabic word reading is a bridge between phonics and fluent word reading. Research points to effective strategies.

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This is very important, when we started talking about this in class, I had no idea what we were talking about and got lost quickly. It is something that students need to understand. I believe this will help them when it comes to reading. If they can break a word into syllables, they can then use their skills to determine the sound of each letter to help sound words out.