Chunking Words

[goldenecho]

My son is having trouble reading three syllable words.   He's having trouble figuring out where to break up the syllables.  Does anyone have any suggestions for helping him to understand this?   Or, if you know of a curriculum that covers this really well, please let me know what volume of the curriculum covers that, and maybe I can find someone to borrow it from. 

[....]

What age?

I'm not a reading expert and I'm trying to figure out at what point my kids were able to do this.  It seemed like All About Spelling inadvertently helped my kids do this.  Can you write some words on a dry erase board and help him separate them into syllables?

Is it possibly he's trying to read something that is way beyond his reading level?

[wendyroo]

Wise Owl Polysyllables helped my kids through this stage.  It doesn't explicitly teach the skill, but it provides TONS of scaffolded practice.  Each word is first presented broken into syllables to help them correctly pronounce it.  Then it is used in a paragraph, so they encounter it normally (unbroken) and have to practice mentally segmenting it.

Wendy

[EKS]

Why does he need to be able to do this?

That said, I don't know how old your son is, but the REWARDS program is great for teaching kids how to read multisyllabic words.  

Also, I believe that the fourth book of Explode the Code teaches the syllable thing as well.  We skipped it because it was adding a layer of complexity that didn't seem necessary.  But this was with a kid who already read well.

[forty-two]

In addition to Wise Owl Polysyllables, Phonics Pathways (and its companion reader, Reading Pathways) and Webster's Speller (free pdf) both provide a similar kind of scaffolded practice.

I second ElizabethB's Syllables Spell Success program.  She also has a lot on her site about using Webster's Speller.

~*~

With my kids, I did have to do more than just practicing the patterns.  (It was because they were unable to break spoken words into syllables or orally blend spoken syllables into words, and they needed those underlying skills to be able to decode unfamiliar multi-syllable words).  So after we'd worked through all of the multi-syllable practice in PP/RP without it generalizing, and did ElizabethB's previous syllables activities (it was before she'd expanded it into SSS) without it generalizing, and did a chunk of Webster's without it generalizing, I did REWARDS.  (I got a used older edition for reasonably cheap.)  Between REWARDS and learning to write in cursive (which requires the ability to read and spell in syllables), they learned how to do it.

 

[domestic_engineer]

I agree with all the resources already mentioned.  And I think that it's just a natural stage/plateau of reading ... Just do a search on these forums for "multisyllabic"

[goldenecho]

14 hours ago, Evanthe said:

What age?

I'm not a reading expert and I'm trying to figure out at what point my kids were able to do this.  It seemed like All About Spelling inadvertently helped my kids do this.  Can you write some words on a dry erase board and help him separate them into syllables?

Is it possibly he's trying to read something that is way beyond his reading level?

 

He's 10 but has some learning difficulties (long story...still figuring out what).   

He's made a lot of progress (AAS has helped but I was wondering i there was something that focused on the reading part...we aren't using AAR right now, and I'm considering it, but I'd actually like to jump ahead to this even if it's not in "order" because it's making it hard for him to read things he wants to read...and he hasn't wanted to read until recently so I don't want to limit him more than necessary.   There's some words I don't expect him to be able to do right now, but some of the words he has trouble with are pretty simple as far as syllables go (something like important...he'll read the first syllable and then just guess at the rest of the word).    But with a two syllable compound word that's just as long, like workbook or sunshine he'll do fine.

[Kanin]

Megawords book 1 is great. There are different sections, with many pages of practice for each section. The first part covers compound words (sunshine), the second does CVC/CVC (gossip, coffee), and goes on from there. 

You can also look up the 6 syllable types, and practice words from each type. Has he learned the rules where to divide syllables, about open and closed syllables, etc? For example, in a CVC/CVC word (ex., gossip), you divide between the two consonants. In a word like mo/tel, you can't divide between two consonants, so you have to choose where to split it - either mot/el, or mo/tel. There are the kind of things he'd learn in Megawords.

I use this multi-syllable word list all the time. It's great:  http://readskill.com/Resources/SkillResourceLists/pdf/RM_Syllabication.pdf

Also, practicing common prefixes and suffixes helps, too. I like to write words on index cards and cut them into syllables, and have kids try to unscramble them into a real word. You can then discuss whether a syllable is open or closed, if the vowel sound is long or short, which syllable is a suffix, etc. Plus, it's a "game." 

Multi-syllable words are going to be really challenging for him if he's not really clear on long and short vowel sounds. My dyslexic students find this very challenging.

 

 

 

[....]

On 2/28/2019 at 9:40 PM, goldenecho said:

 

He's 10 but has some learning difficulties (long story...still figuring out what).   

He's made a lot of progress (AAS has helped but I was wondering i there was something that focused on the reading part...we aren't using AAR right now, and I'm considering it, but I'd actually like to jump ahead to this even if it's not in "order" because it's making it hard for him to read things he wants to read...and he hasn't wanted to read until recently so I don't want to limit him more than necessary.   There's some words I don't expect him to be able to do right now, but some of the words he has trouble with are pretty simple as far as syllables go (something like important...he'll read the first syllable and then just guess at the rest of the word).    But with a two syllable compound word that's just as long, like workbook or sunshine he'll do fine.

 

I haven't looked at AAR since it first came out.  Does it go to a high enough reading level?  I would still be tempted to work for a few minutes every day on the dry erase board, breaking down 3 syllable words in his reading (like you mentioned the word important).  

Did he learn to read with the whole word method at school?  Because that's what my oldest did when she was first reading.  They used that whole word method (or whatever they call it).  She would read the first part and then improvise the rest of the word.  She eventually stopped.