Read the Syllables, Find the Picture, Write Its Number

Eight numbered pictures line the top of this 1st grade read-the-syllables page inside a dashed frame — a mirror, a basketball, a butterfly, a bandage, a hammer, an orange, a cookie and a dragonfly on the sheet shown. Below run six wide rows, each printing one word already split into syllables with hyphens: bas-ket-ball, ban-dage, cook-ie, but-ter-fly, or-ange, mir-ror. At the right of every row is a small dashed box. The child reads the word part by part, finds its picture in the bank, and writes the picture's number in the box. Two pictures in the bank belong to no word, so two numbers are never used.

This is decoding of longer words with the syllable breaks supplied, which is the scaffold reading programs give when a child moves from cat and fan to butterfly. The word is never shown whole; the child has to blend the parts and only then can the picture be matched, and the two distractors mean the picture cannot be found by elimination on the last row. Words run to ten letters and three syllables, with at least one three-syllable word on every sheet.

Print it as the final page of the word families sequence: the carpets and lanes before it work on single-syllable words, and this page carries the reading into multisyllable ones without asking for any writing beyond a numeral. One sheet, pencil, no coloring.