Syllable Cards: Read the Word in Parts

The word under each picture on this first-grade sheet of animals syllable cards is printed with its letters spaced apart, and beneath the letters a green arc spans each syllable: on this print dol-phin, rab-bit, vul-ture, rein-deer, don-key, pen-guin, pan-da and rac-coon. There are eight cut-out cards, two by four. The child cuts them apart, reads each word one arc at a time with a finger under the arc, then says the whole word. The split is printed, so the child never has to decide where a syllable ends.

A first-grade reader stalls on a long word not because the letters are hard but because the whole thing is too much to hold at once; the arcs cut it into pieces of two or three letters each, which is exactly the size a child can decode. The words on the sheet come from a pool of animal names of two to four syllables, checked against a standard hyphenation dictionary, so every arc sits where a dictionary would put it. Reading the parts and then the whole is the routine, and the teacher listens for the join, the moment the two chunks become one word.

A color print, card stock if the cards will be reused, and a finger or a coin to slide from arc to arc. The picture word cards base set at kindergarten shows the same kind of words whole, and the one and many cards move to plural endings. Drawing the syllable split yourself, or sorting words by syllable count, is the syllable worksheet family; these cards print the split for you.