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Bingo is a new obsession of my class that I introduce through new vocabulary or revise old ones.

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Kevin it can pose an issue for students, at my school there's a department that uses a teaching style that is heavily reliant on phonics and I've been told that the students have difficulty with reading comprehension because of it

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At the beginning of each unit, I have the students brainstorm words they know about the subject. It allows me to see how deep their knowledge is about the subject. Based on how they perform, i can add or reduce the amount of vocabulary.

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This is something that comes up often in drama. Doing something else while you're speaking can change how you speak and how you pronounce words. It's weird but meditation and practice helps students with this insofar as students take moments to focus, reflect, and really try to nail pronunciation. We just did Peter Pan and our Wendy kept missing the pronunciation of "mother" a word she has known for ages, but when acting it went out the window.

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This is also a cool one

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Most children begin encountering multisyllabic words in 1st grade. Unfortunately, not all reading programs spend enough (or any!) time teaching students to decode these words. (Does yours?)

While some students will successfully learn to decode multisyllabic words, many other kids will stumble over them for years. They'll skip the ending, or part of the middle, or mispronounce the vowel sounds.

But with our help, students CAN master multisyllabic words! And it only takes a handful of minutes each week.

In today's blog post, I'm sharing 4 engaging activities that will help you teach students how to break up multisyllabic words!

1. Breaking Up Words

This activity is probably the most basic - but it's also the most important! Plain and simple, kids need practice dividing up lots of words, so that they can then apply these skills to their reading.

I use a hands-on approach to begin teaching students to break up words. I have them use different colors to code the consonants and vowels. They use scissors to physically cut each word apart.

Eventually, we usually move to dividing up the words on paper or whiteboards (by drawing lines, not cutting). Students copy the words from the board, or I give them a half-sheet like the one below. At this point, we also stop using colors. Students just use a pencil to mark the consonants, vowels, and syllable types. The process becomes a little bit faster.

My Complete Guide to Teaching Syllable Types & Syllable Division Rules walks you through exactly which syllable division rules to teach - and when. The lessons also cover the syllable types. Everything is laid out for you, and many teachers have mentioned that it's very easy to follow.

If you just need a refresher on the basics of the syllable division rules and syllable division types, however, make sure to check out these blog posts:
How To Teach Students To Divide Words Into Syllables The 6 (or 7) Syllable Types: What They Are, Why They Matter, And When To Teach Them!
2. Color Coding Syllables or Rainbow Syllables

Even after we move to using the half-sheets, I still like to keep syllable division fun and fresh for my kids! "Color Coding Syllables" or "Rainbow Syllables" are two activities that my students enjoy.

Check out the examples below - the first example is for practicing open and closed syllables, and the second example is for practicing open, closed, magic e (silent e), and vowel team syllables.

3. Sorting Words

I'm sure you've heard of a word sort before, but I apply this concept in some unique ways when we work on syllable division.

In the example below, students practice determining whether words have 1 or 2 syllables. All of the words end with -ed; in the accompanying lesson, students learn that while -ed can serve as a syllable by itself (when following the letter t or d), sometimes it has no vowel sound and does not act as its own syllable.

In the word sort example below, students determine whether each word follows the V/CV syllable division rule or the VC/V syllable division rule. (This concept can be tricky - students might have to try dividing the word both ways before figuring out the pattern!)

There are many different ways you can use word sorts to have students practice syllable division!

4. Code, Roll, and Read

This activity is great for word division practice AND word reading fluency.

In each activity below, students divide up all the words first. Then, they roll a die, read a word in the column they rolled, and cover it. They continue until all words are covered.

More Resources

All of the resources pictured in this blog post come from my Complete Guide to Teaching Syllable Types and Syllable Division Rules!

It can be a lot to figure out on your own, but the guide includes scripted lesson plans to make syllable division easy for your students (and you!) to understand.

This mini-program fits into ANY phonics program. The table of contents tells you exactly when to teach each lesson. You match it to whatever concepts you're teaching, and you can progress at your own pace. Here's the Table of Contents:

Each week includes lesson plans, words for students to divide, and practice activities like Color Coding Syllables, Code, Roll, and Read, and more. The first few sections start out slowly, so that students first understand what a syllable is (helpful for any grade, but especially appropriate for 1st grade).

If you'd like to learn more about this resource or purchase it, please use this link.

Last but not least, always keep your purpose in mind when teaching multisyllabic words: to help students READ! While these out-of-context activities are important, it's also essential that we remind students how to apply these principles when they're reading actual texts.

I hope this post was helpful to you! If you'd like to grab a free phonics guide that includes tons of phonics terms and rules in one place, get the freebie here.

Happy teaching!

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4 Engaging Activities for Teaching Multisyllabic Words - Learning at the Primary Pond

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Most children begin encountering multisyllabic words in 1st grade. Unfortunately, not all reading programs spend enough (or any!) time teaching students to decode these words. (Does yours?) While some students will successfully learn to decode multisyllabic words, many other kids will stumble over them for years.

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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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As I teach Social Studies I make my students rather mind map answer questions use the new words or use maps to utilize those words.

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Kevin I think you need to model how to break down the words for the students. start with CVC words and gradually increase the difficulty by moving on to blends, long and short vowel sounds. For multiple syllable, you need to teach the students how to divide the syllables. overall you need to increase the difficulty over time

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in our school we have students whose native language is Korean and they usually have difficulties with pronouncing letter l and r, and differentiating between them

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I think spaced repetition and Flashcard are very useful in learning a language and would help students to memorize the phonemic

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I would turn it into a project in art class. The project itself would act as a sort of mindmap with elements of mneumonics and picture superiority so that students can own and appreciate the distinctions between irregular and regular words.

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Whole sounds are different! I speak German and the 'w' sound is entirely different. I know that teaching my students the 'th' is more difficult because it doesn't exist in Mandarin

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This could be confusing a little bit for elementary students. I had in my class a whole discussion about how to pronounce the word ’data’. What I did was making them search and watch a video to find out. Some still were not feeling one of them is correct, however, they aware that there are two ways to pronounce it.

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For elementary students, I use "Action Reading" Students read sentences and must perform actions that are listed above certain words. S

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Reading follow-along-- I put a PPT on the board as we read a story so they can see the words and follow along

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For secondary school students:

Flashcards - finding definitions from the text

Mind mapping - connecting ideas from the text

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In drama I would use a mix of spaced repetition and reading aloud to give students a chance to check that they are able to remember a given text. It could be something like spot the mistake in a small passage that we use for an entire unit and students get time to spend with it and then once every two weeks I read it out loud with a mistake that they have to spot and correct.

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I think that beginner students, when learning a new language, will revert back to the rules and pronunciations of their native language. Therefore, certain letter sounds that sound different in the native language ,or are nonexistent, may be more difficult to teach.