Phonics Development: Support for Grades 2+
Before starting Stay at Home Activity Mom, I was an elementary school teacher in California. I taught both 4th and 2nd grade during my teaching career. The majority of my students at both of the districts I taught at, came to my classroom reading far below grade level. I noticed that they didn't have the phonics tools and strategies needed to decode multisyllabic words.
My hope is to share some powerful and effective strategies and tools that you can implement with your child at home to support them with their phonics development. This way, when your child is reading and comes to a new or unfamiliar word, they have a variety of tools and strategies ready to tackle and decode that word! Without these tools and strategies, many children will resort to guessing and/or skipping an unfamiliar or tricky multisyllabic word.
These tools and strategies should not be introduced until your child has mastered phonemic awareness (understanding that words have individual sounds that make up words). If you have a child ages 2-6 and/or one that is working on phonemic awareness, refer to my good friend Gina and her post HERE for more support in phonics in early childhood education.
Multisyllabic Words and the Different Types of Syllables
Multisyllabic words are words that have two or more syllables. We hear one vowel sound for every syllable in a word. Example: napkin is broken into the syllables nap/kin.
There are 6 main syllable types (See the picture below)
These are the 6 main types of syllables. An understanding and knowledge of these 6 types of syllable patterns can be extremely helpful for decoding and spelling. They are especially helpful with struggling readers and writers.
Scroll down to see mini posters of each syllable type. If you would like the mini posters for yourself (each one is 8.5 x 11), download by clicking below:
6syllabletypesPDF
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Download PDF • 98KB
Once you've introduced all 6 of these syllable types, try doing some activities like this one HERE!
In addition to the 6 syllable types, there's many more helpful strategies you can introduce and teach to your child to help with with phonics. These strategies will also help them decode unfamiliar words, which will help move your child to a place where their phonics is automatic and the focus can move to fluency and reading comprehension.
Each of these strategies could be an entirely new blog post (possibly in the future), but for now, here's a list of some of my favorite strategies to teach children when reading to support their phonics development:
Use word parts (root words/prefixes/suffixes)
Look at the pictures
Attach images to new words
Stretch out the word
Reread
Skip the word (then come back)
Look for vowel patterns you know
Divide the word into syllables
Is it a B or a D?
Is it a sight word?
Chunk the word
Flip the vowel sound
Get your lips ready
Cross check (Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense?)
Three sounds of -ed (/t/ /d/ /id)
If you would like a copy of these reading strategy cards, you can download them for free here:
Reading Strategy Cards
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Download PDF • 611KB
I hope these tips are helpful! Feel free to refer back to my instagram post about it HERE.
~Brittany