6. Assessing Your Students for Syllable Awareness

It's important that we give students the time that they need to solidify word recognition skills.  Otherwise, gaps in their reading skills may cause problems later.  In the case of syllables, this is a phonological skill that may not need to be mastered before moving on to the more difficult skills in the phonological sequence.  In other words, many students will be able to identify and manipulate phonemes without having to practice breaking words into syllables.

Mastery assessments are quick checks to see if your students can accurately and consistently perform a skill. (We’ve got one for you below.) Generally, you’ll know it’s time to give a student a mastery assessment when they’re able to perform their new skill accurately three times in a row, on three different occasions (for example, three days in a row). Since many students will be able to recognize syllables easily, this assessment may only be necessary for struggling students.  For these students, it would be wise to see if they can identify an initial phoneme even if they are not able to recognize syllables.  If this is the case, you can move on to teaching them onset-rime.  

Here’s a short assessment for you to use to check your students’ mastery of syllable segmenting, blending, and deleting. It should take no longer than two to three minutes per child. Feel free to share our assessment with your colleagues.

1. Assess one student at a time.
2. Give a student one task at a time.
3. Do not have any print visible, since you’re assessing a phonological skill. 
4. Do not set a time limit for tasks (typically, each takes two to three minutes per student).
5. Record incorrect responses. Address misunderstandings later on.
6. Do not mark issues caused by a student’s dialect or speech impediments as errors.

Students who respond correctly 80% of the time (or higher) on the assessment we’ve provided are ready to move on to the next skill in the phonological awareness continuum (in this case, onset-rime). 

For those who aren’t reaching 80%, there are three instructional options you can use to provide additional support: 

1. Add Time and Repetitions

You can consider bumping up the amount of time for instruction, slowing the pace of instruction, and increasing practice time. For example, while some children might catch on with blending compound words after working through five words, other children might need 10 or 20.

2. Change Your Instruction

If Quiet Yell doesn't deliver results, you could try another instructional approach. For example, you could use picture cards that represent both of the individual words within a compound word (a picture of a foot and a picture of a ball) and use them to help students both segment and blend.

3. Change Your Student Groupings

If students have been practicing only in whole group, try small group instruction. If students are practicing in a small group and are falling behind most kids, consider one-on-one practice. Some students may need numerous individual practice opportunities with prompt corrective feedback.