I’ll never forget what a colleague of mine told me in my early days of teaching: “Once the kids get to third grade, there isn’t a way to help them figure out a word. You just have to tell them what it is, and then they’ll memorize it.” 🙄
I know, I know.
This didn’t sit well with me, but I had no authority and little experience with this grade level at the time. What I did, however, was my own detective work to uncover the truth, and to help those students out.
You cannot tell me that once a child is in third grade reading instruction ends, and that there is no way to support these readers to read the longer, multisyllabic words in their chapter books and content texts across curricula.
So what did I do? I watched and listened. I observed the types of words that were stumping these readers.
Here is what I discovered about most of them:
With some of the words, students could have used knowledge of advanced phoneme-grapheme relationships to blend and sound out words. They could have tried different sounds made by the same letter. For example, EA and CH each make three different and unique sounds.
If students had been provided explicit instruction on syllable types, they could have identified where the division occurs in each word and divide the word into manageable syllables.
They could have isolated the root, base, and affixes, thereby also making the word more manageable to decode.
10+ years later and I still cringe when I think about that comment, and at the thought of this idea (or rather, lie) being perpetuated — that reading instruction at the intermediate and upper elementary level comes to a halt because the words “can’t be sounded out” like readers are taught to do in K-2.
As students get older and have more advanced texts in their hands, we must move with them and guide them and give them more advanced strategies. It’s no coincidence that this is also the age when students, who once liked to read, avoid it. There is an absence of explicit strategies to support them. It’s now hard. It’s frustrating. It’s no longer enjoyable.
Decoding text is just one component of the ability to be a proficient reader. We need comprehension as well. However, if students cannot master decoding fluently, they will not be able to work on comprehending efficiently. With explicit instruction in advanced phonemic and phonological awareness, syllable division, and morphology, we can help bridge that instructional gap and provide students with what they need to guide them towards becoming competent and confident readers who actually want to read once they cross the bridge from the lower elementary grades to the upper elementary grades. One best practice at a time, and we CAN appropriately support and motivate these transitional readers.