Spelling multisyllabic words
pro·nun·ci·a·tion
/prəˌnənsēˈāSH(ə)n/
noun
the way in which a word is pronounced.
"spelling does not determine pronunciation."
If you are a teacher of literacy, or even if you are the observer of a new learner, do you notice your child using "speech to print?" And if not, guide them so they are, and keep reading so I can explain.
My daughter was trying to memorize her written response to an essay question on a test. She gets points off for spelling. While reading her answer to me last night, I noticed that she stumbled on the giant five-syllable word 'REPRESENTATION.' It was all wrapped up in the fun Revolutionary War phrase, "taxation without representation," so I assumed she just got her tongue-tied up. We even laughed a little and discussed a few more tongue-twisting characters; Sally and our friend the woodchuck.
This morning, Lucy joined me in the kitchen, excited to tell me about a trick she would use to spell 'representation' on the test. She saw the word 'present' in it, (like Christmas present), so she decided she would focus on that, then add some initial letters here and ending letters there. As if she was adding tinsel to the Christmas tree. Okay….back up. I put my peanut butter knife down and stopped making lunches.
"Say the word, Lucy." The tongue-tie episode happened again, even though she was trying to repeat the word and not reading it in the full paragraph.
I gave it to her syllable by syllable (Syllables, they are essential. Know your syllable types so you can help your children/students)
Rep. Re. Sen. Ta. Tion. Five syllables were a little much for our early-morning brains, so I used some morphology with her, but only because I knew she could handle it, and it allowed us to focus on four chunks instead of five. Rep. Re. Sent. -Ation.
Once I had my kiddo correctly saying this fantastic history term, we talked about meaning, and then she could spell it by just saying the syllables. Speech-to-print, get it? :) If you had to spell a few 2-4 letter words (or, in this case, syllables), it would be a lot less problematic than going to school thinking about that 14-letter word you might misspell on the exam after lunch. Yikes. Yea, the rise of anxiety in our children is also real and a whole other conversation.
Last month, I told a friend about this same concept and how it would help if she had her son and daughter both read their spelling lists with correct pronunciation before studying the spellings. I heard back from her recently and wanted to share, "The kids are improving so much in reading and spelling! They even told me how much they like going through their spelling words now!"
As always, I hope something here is helping you to help a child read and spell. Until next time, I am off to read.