Trouble with the last few lessons in OPGTR

[MeaganS]

My dd is finishing up OPGTR.  She is what I consider a fluent reader and is reading books like Boxcar Children with ease right now.  As we've been working on these last 15 lessons or so, she's been really struggling with multi-syllable words.  I really don't feel like she completely gets how to break one down if it is unfamiliar to her.  Words like "potato" and "psychiatry," although granted psychiatry is especially difficult, but this is a consistent problem with words of 3+ syllables that she doesn't know already.  Are there any resources for teaching this better?  She is using AAS and has been introduced to the concept of open and closed syllables, which does help.  I think I remember seeing old classic books that broke words up by their syllables.  Maybe something like that for more practice?  The feeling I get is that she just needs more exposure and guidance and practice and I don't want to end phonics-instruction with her until she has a better grasp on this.  I have a Kindle and an iPad, so ebook helps are fine.

[ElizabethB]

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/WellTaughtPhonicsStudent.html

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/syllabledividedb.html

 

[Sahamamama]

We did those last lessons of OPG when the girls were towards the end of Kindergarten. Like your daughter, they were reading well (Boxcar, Little House in the Big Woods), but they still had a bit of a hard time with some of the breakdowns. They enjoyed the silliness of some of the phrases, though. :)

 

If they struggled, I just helped them through. I think it's important to consider the "final" lessons of OPG as just another step along the way, not the end of phonics instruction nor a "test" of how well the teaching has taken hold. True proficiency is going to take time, maturation, and practice. I also think that setting OPG aside for a time and moving forward with AAS helped my girls to better understand the structure of words.

 

What we did was to come back to those lessons again, sometime in first grade. At that point, they had had more experience with breaking words into syllables, more time in AAS, and more practice with Guided Reading (they read to me).

 

I do think it was good to go back and do those lessons again, after some time had passed. But the most important thing we do for reading is Guided Reading. Here, I have one-on-one time with each student. She reads to me, usually from Christian Liberty Nature Readers, McGuffey's, or Classics for Young Readers, though my oldest is now choosing her selections. We work on reading "non-robotically," pronunciation, enunciation, volume, tone of voice, rhythm, expression, reading dialogue, reading poetry, reading nonfiction, and so on. We talk about the meaning of words or phrases, what is happening in the passage, and whether or not we agree with the moral urgings of Mr. McGuffey. ;) We also skip the Dead Mother passages in McGuffey. Otherwise, these books are great tools for Guided Reading. All you need is the book, the kid, and an attentive adult. HTH.

 

 

 

[Penelope]

My children have needed more practice with multisyllable words. There are a lot of products out there you could use, or just continue reading good books. I prefer something more structured where the words are shown as being broken down into syllables, so I like Webster's and McGuffey for extra practice.

[MeaganS]

Thanks for the suggestions.  They echo my gut feeling.  At this point I will continue on and finish it.  Then she'll continue reading aloud to me daily.  I was almost decided to redo the end of OPGTR once we finished it but I like the idea of waiting a few more months before doing that. Thanks again for your thoughts.

[Peregrine]

We broke those last few lessons up into just 3-4 words a day. I also gave my DS a piece of paper that he could use to block off parts of a word to study one syllable at a time. Then we immediately switched to a "review" page that was easy for him so we ended on a positive note. 

[HelenNotOfTroy]

All I can say about those is that we got through it. I am having DS use ElizabethB's videos now (a year later) to really bring home sounding out multisyllable words because he really wants to just guess at them.

[Tanikit]

I found it was easier to teach my DD multisyllable words in the books she was reading to me. I just kept a piece of paper with me when she read to me and if there was a suitable word I wrote it out for her (even the ones she knew) Initially I broke them into syllables thereby splitting the lesson into two parts - reading open and closed syllables and finally actually breaking a word into syllables. 

 

However, multisyllable words can be tricky - this is why there is a song about potato/potAto and tomato/tomAto - because many dialects do not pronounce them all the same. Even more tricky is when words that look very similar have syllables with accents in different areas and are therefore have differently pronounced syllables - there are ways of knowing (usually Latin and Greek words) but sometimes instead of teaching this it is better to teach it as vocabulary than as a phonics lesson. (Usually these words are beyond 4th grade level however).

[rachelpants]

Explode the Code book 4 might help :)