Last Updated on October 16, 2023 by Editorial Team
Syllable learning is a crucial aspect of acquiring reading and speaking skills. Syllables are nothing but different sounds that constitute a word. As a part of the process of learning the morphology of words, the students may need to break down the words into syllables to ease reading or spelling them.
Hence, familiarizing them with syllables and their usage is quite important. In this post, we bring you fun activities that suit the kindergartener’s needs and make them proficient in syllables.
Teaching syllables: How do activities help?
Activities for syllables are aimed at boosting phonological awareness. A child is able to pronounce or write words correctly only because of complete knowledge of phonemes that constitute spelling. Since the words may contain more than one phoneme, most of the activities revolve around teaching how to break words into syllables. The learners may be required to count syllables too. The overall benefits offered by syllable activities are:
- Kids understand the morphology of words better and are not forced to mug up spelling
- Kindergarteners can understand the difference between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words
- Different ways of counting syllables keep children engaged and they don’t mind practicing syllables to perfection
Interesting syllable activities ideas for kindergarten tots
You have to think like kids to design activities that appeal to them. Enticing kids to learn something new is one of the aims of all activities. Listed here are a few easily doable activities that are based on a multisensory approach and deliver better results in terms of developing ease with syllables.
1. Clap on every syllable
A word may have more than one syllable. Hence, it is necessary to identify each of them to become a fluent speller. If you miss any of the syllables while speaking, you are most likely to end up writing or sounding out the spelling incorrectly. In this activity, you display words on the flashcards first. Ask the child to sound it out, and clap on every syllable detected.
You can even ask them to note the frequency of clapping to help them understand multisyllabic words. Kids may tend to stray away from learning if the process is monotonous. Though it is essential to include repeat sessions in the class, this activity can augment learning by offering supplementary support.
2. Pass the ball
Passing the ball is familiar to all little kids. You can employ this playful act to teach syllable counting. Write a word on the board and make groups of two children each. Ask them to pass the ball each time they break the word into a syllable. Another child can note the number of times the ball changed hands to concentrate on the concept of multi-syllables.
Teaching syllables does require tricking kids into focusing on the sounds that constitute the word. Little learners find it effortless to associate passing the ball with counting syllables; the activity stimulates the mind to think in diverse ways too!
3. Use picture cards with numbers on them
A picture card is a common item used to teach word-picture association. You can modify this picture card by adding numbers 1,2,3 and so on below the picture. Kids will break the word for the picture into syllables and tick mark the digit that represents the number of phonemes found in the spelling.
Syllable learning is a part of building phonemic awareness. This activity helps cultivate the habit of producing all sounds, which ultimately brings in fluency in spelling and improves speech too. While catering to kids with diverse learning curves, this activity helps keep all little learners on the same page.
4. Weird names for starting sound
Kids can find a ubiquitous tool for learning in this activity. Easy to perform anywhere, it helps build knowledge of onsets. They concentrate on the starting sound of the commonly used objects and use a weird name for them. Taken from the book, ‘There is a Wocket in My Docket by Seuss, 1974,’ kids can make other combinations like There is a Zallet in my Wallet, There is a Zook in the book, There is Zack in the Back, and so on. You can make them amply aware of the onset and rhyme concept by conducting this playful activity.
The activity allows systematic building up of phonics skills in little learners but in a fun way. Memory build-up and recall boosting reflect in fluency with which kids form myriad word families; an appreciable outcome you will achieve by regular intervening.
5. Guess the word
In this activity, you show the picture card and also break the word into syllables. Ask the child to blend syllables presented to them in a broken manner. While blending the phonemes, they can clap as many times as the ‘pluses’ appear in the spelling. For example, in the phonetic spelling of the word ‘Happy’, /h+A+pEE/, kids can clap two times.
Phonetic expressions can be overwhelming, but this activity takes away the difficult part and turns the process into fun. A sure shot outcome is learning how to break the word into correct phonemes. The picture cue-word arrangement strengthens picture-sound association and the phonemic blending and segmentation process improves spelling abilities as well.
6. Clip card activities
How to help little kids dive deeper into spelling learning? This syllable offers the perfect solution to this query. In the clip card activity, a picture is drawn on the card, and the middle letter spaces are kept blank. Three options are provided on the side from where they can pick the applicable option.
For example, in the cue word Boat, A boat is drawn and spaces for ‘o’ and ‘a’ are left blank. The child clips the option where ‘oa’ is displayed on the side of the card. It is how the activity helps in learning syllables and also CVC concepts in spelling. Kids get to improve their word formation skills with this innovative yet simple pedagogical approach to teaching spelling.
7. Play with color-coded letter blocks
Mostly the blocks color-coded in this activity will be representing vowels and consonants. It is more suitable for learning three-letter words or monosyllables. You can make a bunch of picture cards to show an image such as a sun, bag, dog, etc. Kids will place the color-coded block in the respective positions of vowel and consonant and will identify the syllable. You can speed up the challenge to help kids think quickly and bring swiftness in their way of breaking the word into syllables.
8. Count syllables with colored chips
Counting chip manipulatives are the usable tools of this activity. You can provide a picture card with blocks for placing counting chips on them. Kids name the picture while breaking it into syllables, and place the corresponding number of counting chips on the blocks.
Concentrating on syllables is important to ensure that kids don’t miss out on letters while spelling or pronouncing the word. It forms a robust primer for building basic phonemic awareness and knowledge of mono and multi-syllables. This syllable activity complements homeschooling and classroom environments effortlessly and also offers a source of engagement whenever kids’ minds begin to wander.
Syllable activities: Inclusive way of building language skills
How to make education easy for all? This question has been the focus of researchers for decades. The activities grabbed the researchers’ attention due to their positive impact on the learning curve. Some of the interesting findings on syllable activities’ role in making kindergarteners efficient readers and spellers are:
- An effective syllable activity-based instruction[1] can boost the learning of phonemic awareness and help understand phonemic blending and decoding more easily.
- Word processing and the decoding process improve with an increase in syllable awareness[2], an achievement of the syllable activities.
- Children start learning to read[3] when they cognitively associate spelling (or parts of it) with respective sounds. Syllable activities offer ample scope for training the mind to form this association.
To be a fluent reader or orator, phonemic awareness is a must. Syllables, the basic sounds embedded in a word, need to be mastered to develop ease with basic language skills. Activities and online syllable games offer a practical approach to the learning process and elongate retention span.
Conclusion
Decoding words and reblending phonemes correctly are essential for forming spellings. Syllable activities at the kindergarten level help reduce the reading struggles that children face in Grade 1 and Grade 2. These activities, due to their multisensory nature, allow young reading beginners to have a strong base from the very start despite the gap in grasping abilities. Performance in syllable activities also offers the base for deciding reading comprehension IEP goals which we have discussed in one of our posts.
References
- Ukrainetz, Teresa & Nuspl, Janae & Wilkerson, Kimberly & Beddes, Sarah. (2010). The effects of syllable instruction on phonemic awareness in preschoolers. Early Childhood Research Quarterly. 26. 50-60. 10.1016/j.ecresq.2010.04.006.
- Güldenoğlu, B. (n.d.). The effects of syllable-awareness skills on the word-reading performances of students reading in a transparent orthography. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 8(3), 425–442. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1096574.pdf
- DOIGNON-CAMUS, N., & ZAGAR, D. (2014). The syllabic bridge: The first step in learning spelling-to-sound correspondences*. Journal of Child Language, 41(5), 1147-1165. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000913000305
I am Pratiksha Bhatt, Bachelor of Life Science, and Masters in Management Studies. I have done certification courses in early education counseling. I am a writer, a mother of a child with spelling difficulties which drove me to alternative resources of education like manipulatives and participatory activities. My areas of expertise are learning difficulties, alternative learning methods, and activity-based learning.