In what order do I teach syllable types?

Miss Rae's Room Scope and Sequence of Teaching Syllable Types

By teaching students to divide words into parts, or "chunks", we help speed up the process of decoding.  Knowing the rules for syllable division can help students read words more accurately and fluently. It can also help students learn to spell words correctly.

Why teach syllable types, you ask? Because within those syllables lies the roadmap to fluent decoding and encoding!  Mastering these patterns not only simplifies reading but also empowers students to tackle multisyllabic words with confidence.
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But how do you know what syllables to teach when???

A scope and sequence can be a helpful tool for teachers!  A scope and sequence gives us a list of skills that students should develop in order to move toward achievement of an end goal.

So for example, if being a successful reader is my end goal, I have to master phonemic awareness.  Phonemic Awareness is broken down into sub skills that I must master in order to master Phonemic Awareness.  For example, I must learn to segment, blend, and manipulate phonemes.  As I am mastering Phonemic Awareness, I am going to begin to be introduced to phonics skills that I am going to be expected to master as well.  

Scope and sequences can help us to tailor our instruction to meet our students’ developmental needs.

​You can grab my scope and sequences for reading HERE - from Phonemic Awareness skills to Vocabulary, grab developmentally appropriate and grade-level aligned scope and sequences HERE!

It also helps us to identify the lagging skill areas that we can target with some instructional intervention.

Let’s think about it!

At the start of each year, at the end of each term, and sometimes every so weeks, we assess our students’ skills.  These assessments provide us with knowledge of our students’ abilities towards an end goal, or learning standard.  And being the amazingly awesome teachers that we are, we analyze those assessments. 

Now, here is where a scope and sequence comes into play and becomes a useful tool for us teachers!

When we are analyzing our students’ assessments, we can compare their skill attainment to a developmentally appropriate scope and sequence.  This allows us to see our students’ “gaps” or lagging skill areas that we can target with our instruction.

Let’s go back to our Phonemic Awareness example for a moment.  

Here are the six layers of Phonemic Awareness skills, beginning with the simplest and ending in the most complex skill:
1-Phoneme Isolation
2-Blending
3-Segmentation
4-Addition
5-Deletion
6-Substitution 

If Zoe’s Phonemic Awareness assessment demonstrates mastery of Phoneme Isolation, Segmentation, Addition, and Deletion, but a weakness in Blending and Substitution, my intervention instruction will target Blending to improve both the Blending and Substitution competencies.

​I use an intentional 3 step approach to designing reading instruction for students with Learning Disabilities that you can learn more about HERE!

So in what order do I teach syllable types?

This is what I would suggest for a scope and sequence -aligned with grade levels - for teaching syllable types:
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Closed and Open Syllables (K/1)*
CVCe (1)
Vowel Teams (2)
R-Controlled (2)
Consonant -le (3) 

By the end of Third Grade, it is developmentally appropriate to expect that all syllable types should have been introduced, practiced, and mastered.

*When I teach Closed and Open Syllables, I teach the term Closed Syllable first.  I use the language of “Closed Syllable” when teaching CVC words.  Then, I introduce Open Syllables by comparing them to Closed Syllables.

Related resources...

I hope this blog has been helpful!  If you want to learn more, follow me on Instagram where I share knowledge like this AND MORE!
Happy and healthy teaching!

PEACE,
Miss Rae
References:
Moats. L.C.& Tolman, C. A. (2019). LETRS (3rd edition). Voyager Sopris Learning.
Really Great Reading: https://www.reallygreatreading.com/six-layers-phonemic-awareness

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