New polysyllable word games
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Do you know a learner who is struggling to read polysyllable words? Try our new, download-and-print card games, called Syl-lab-it.
A free game, with the easiest words, is here, and the full set is here.
Elle Holloway, Spelfabet’s expert at turning work into fun, explains the game in this 6 minute video:
2-4 syllable words are printed on the cards, and players must read them as they’re played. Smaller-print versions of each word have syllables circled and stressed syllables shaded. Sometimes, syllable circles overlap, as there’s often more than one way to break a word up (e.g. by sound or word structure. Skilled readers think about both), and coarticulation happens between syllables, not just within them.
The circles and shading make it easy to show learners that a syllable can be represented by a vowel letter alone, or a vowel letter/spelling plus one or more consonants. This is useful when teaching learners to read one syllable at a time, and adjust word stress.
There are five types of cards, three of which are used on your own turn (attack, steal, heal) and two of which are used to spoil your opponent’s turn (deflect, overpower). This game is for two players who each start with five cards and ten tokens (counters, coins, whatever). Play continues until someone loses all their tokens, and thus the game.
The free sample game targets words with simple syllables and spelling patterns, such as on the cards depicted above. The other 12 games target the following syllable structures and sound-spelling relationships:
- CVCC and CCVC syllables, e.g. ‘suspect’, ‘umbrella’ and ‘experiment’,
- Three adjacent consonants (CCC) like ‘splendid’, ‘nondescript’ and ‘unrestricted’,
- Consonant digraphs like ‘jacket’, ‘marathon’ and ‘establishment’,
- Very common suffixes like ‘risky’, ‘talented’ and ‘abandoning’,
- VCe (‘split vowel’) syllable endings like ‘suppose’, ‘hesitate’ and ‘misfortune’.
- The sound /ae/ as in ‘betray’, ‘repainted’ and ‘complicated’,
- The sound /ee/ as in ‘medium’, ‘easily’ and ‘convenient’,
- The sound /oe/ as in ‘shadow’, ‘nobody’ and ‘overloaded’,
- The sound /er/ as in ‘hurting’, ‘thirstily’ and ‘personally’,
- The sound /ou/ as in ‘without’, ‘astounding’ and ‘powerhouses’
- The sound /ie/ as in ‘direct’, ‘justify’ and ‘insightful’,
- The sound /oo/ as in ‘cartoon’, ‘screwdriver’ and ‘absolutely’.
There’s a choice of single or double-sided card version of each game, the latter in case your Syl-lab-it decks might get jumbled. Print each game on 3 sheets of A4 light card or paper (at ~110% if your printer can manage narrow margins), laminate and cut up into cards. Sorry we can’t do that for you, but we timed it and each deck takes about 10 minutes to cut up neatly with scissors, and less with a guillotine.
We hope your learners enjoy the games, and learn to read polysyllable words confidently and well.
7 responses to “New polysyllable word games”
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This game will be perfect for my students with IEPs this fall! Thank you so much!
You’re welcome, thanks for the nice feedback!
Can this game be played with more than two people?
Ha, good question! I was trying to play it with three people when working with a child and their parent, but not having as much success as others on my team were reporting. Finally we realised it was because it’s best played in pairs. Fewer players means more repetitions per player and less wait time, so could you print enough for everyone to play in pairs?
I absolutely LOVE this idea, Alison and Elle! Thank you. I have a Year 3 class that would fully embrace this game. I have one question – we follow Sounds-Write’s approach to syllabification which suggests, where possible, that each syllable begin with a consonant sound to enable the student to better hear the vowel sound that follows it. Would it be possible to have a Sounds-Write aligned version of the cards such that syllables looked like this – to/pic, va/ni/lla, bo/ta/ni/cal, mi/ni/mum etc? Sy/lla/bit?
Thank you for all your hard work and continued generosity in sharing free resources.
Hi Megan, Alison here, we use Sounds-Write too, but like to take both phonology and morphology into account when dividing up long words, hence the circles that sometimes overlap. We also avoid doubled consonants in syllable-initial position as they don’t occur in this position in real words (except llama and perhaps there are a few other outliers) and in English orthography are often used to signal the pronunciation of the preceding vowel (hence tapping/taping, dinner/diner, hopping/hoping, cutter/cuter etc) or occur because of prefixes, which are often assimilated (e.g. ad + com + modus + ate + ion = ‘accommodation’). Syllable division is something that’s often been done in a rulesy, wordy way that is clearly not effective, and Sounds-Write cuts through that and focusses on the sounds and their spellings, which is great, but I’m not aware of the research showing it’s easier to discern a vowel if it’s preceded by a consonant, I’ll have to chase that up. I’m asking our staff who did Sounds-Write training more recently than me about this, I’ve done it three times but maybe there is new research supporting this. Also, the more we work with older kids and read the morphology research, the more we value taking morphology into account when tackling long words. If there is solid research supporting a shift back to a strict focus on phonology in syllable division, then we will certainly revise these cards. Thanks for your lovely feedback!
Hi Alison, thanks so much for the time and care you’ve taken with your response. I agree that working with older students gives you the opportunity to better use morphology when tackling long words. It has been interesting with my Year 3 students this year as we have looked at both morphology and phonology in spelling, noting that morphology is consistent in its spelling even when pronunciation shifts. This is giving the children the opportunity to choose what serves them best to help them spell a word. Working with word matrices has also made word building and suffixing conventions more explicit as they can more clearly see the building blocks of words (morphemes). Thanks again for your continued generosity and support of all of us at the coalface of teaching. We need all the help we can get! 🙂