Reading multisyllabic words

[Judyandherdreamofhorses]

How do you teach this? Letters and sounds makes vague references to 'teach how to read the multisyllabic word xxx' and so on, but I can't find any advice anywhere on how to do this with pupils who are struggling.

They can find how many syllables are in a word, aurally, but get really stuck when faced with reading unknown ones. These are children from years 2-6, working within or beyond phase 5 phonics.

Any guidance I can find online seems to be American and used different terminology and methodology to us.

Thanks.

Investigate multisyllable words they know,,,they will find each syllable has a vowel sound or is a vowel sound eg hipp o pot a mus. Then model how to break unknown words into syllables with the vowel sounds separated and then get them to do this. You should also be showing them how to blend the syllables together...hipp o, hipp o pot, hipp o pot a, hipp o pot am us. (There is further work on stressed syllables if you get them that far). I call this 'word attack' and Y7 think it's a game. Use words printed big for them to cut up or put together. Use whiteboards so they can really get into the words.

Thanks for your reply. That's actually what I have been doing, but they just can't spot the syllables once they try to tackle words they don't know. I must not be explaining things well enough.

Might be that they haven't got secure understanding of what a vowel sound is.

Toe by toe has really good advice on this.

It teaches that:
A syllable ends with the first constanant after a vowel.

(For/get car/pet mon/day )

And gets you to practice breaking up nonsense words that way.

Then it adds more rules like:

• don't break up double letters
• don't break up sh ch th tch
• don't break up the final e

I'll look for toe by toe in school. Thanks.

"It teaches that:
A syllable ends with the first constanant after a vowel."

I very much hope that it doesn't teach anything of the sort.