Saturday, August 25, 2012

step#17: 2-3 syllable words

a syllable is that part of the word that comprises of 1 vowel sound. a word can be made up of 1 syllable or many. how many syllables a word will have doesnt depend on the length of the word. it also doesnt depend on the consonant sounds. what divides a word into syllables is the number of vowel sounds in that word.

a question often raised by many childre, "why are we learning about syllables?"

it is a valid question and we need to give valid justifications.

it is important to learn how to divide words into syllables, so that when a child hears a big word, he doesnt feel scared with the length. he may try breaking the word into small syllables in his mind and attempt at spelling the word. it is seen that children who try to write a new big word by following syllabification make much less mistakes than those who randomly guess at the word.

a grade 2 child can be introduced the concept of syllables using following examples:

1 syllable words:
cat, mix, licks, watch, ship, lock, hand, home, caught, straight, stretch, and so on

2 syllable words:
window:win-dow
happy: ha-ppy
monkey: mon-key
laptop: lap-top
pencil: pen-cil
picture: pic-ture
clever: cle-ver
gifted: gif-ted 
photo: pho-to
cupboard: cup-board
...and so on

3 syllable words:
computer: com-pu-ter
telephone: te-le-phone
talented: ta-len-ted
cinema: ci-ne-ma
elephant: e-le-phant
capable: ca-pa-ble
beautiful: beau-ti-ful
fantastic: fan-tas-tic
...and so on

when the child sees the chunks into which the word is broken, he feels more encouraged to read as he knows many of these small chunks by now. when he joins the chunks, he almost knows the word he is reading.

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