What to Do When Your Child Can't Tell if a Syllable is a Short or Long Sound

I run into this problem with struggling readers. They get stuck when learning how to read compound words and multisyllabic words (word with many syllable sounds) because they don't know a few things.

They are not sure where to find the syllable sounds in a word like snapshot.

The first thing we do is say the word together. "Snapshot."

Then I remind them that each that we said the word as

snap shot.

It had 2 syllable sounds in it (each syllable has at least one vowel in it).

We look to see if the vowel is followed by a consonant. In this case it is.

When a word has a single vowel with a consonant or a pair of consonants following it, it typically will make a short sound.

These are the types of skills I teach students when they get stuck reading words. But guess what? This skill will help them when they go to spell words as well!

When asked to spell the word snapshot, we say it together to determine how many syllables it is. I have them write two lines on their page. Then we sound out the word by letter sound. We determine if the syllable sound is long or short and then we use our skills and write the word.

But there is more! We need to address the long vowel sound with a single vowel. Let's use a three syllable word like rodeo.

When we say the word rodeo, we have three syllable sounds:

ro-de-o.

We notice that each syllable sound ends with a vowel. It is NOT closed in by a consonant so it is called an OPEN Syllable. That means the vowel is going to say it's name and in this word we will use a long o, long e, and another long o. (Long vowels say their name.)

Try this simple trick with your struggling reader or writer and see if it opens the door to some new words!

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