Syllables

Syllables is an interesting topic. Cunningham talks about clapping syllables and having categories of words to play around with when learning this concept. (Cunningham, 2009) It brought to mind what my daughter’s first grade teacher does in her class. She has these “caught being good” cards which she hands out to hard workers, especially when the person next to them is being disruptive. When a child receives a “caught being good” card that child writes his or her name on it and puts it into a red box. Every Friday Mrs. Vega takes the box, and pulls out five random cards. The kids have to be at school that day, and no one can get picked twice. If a child’s name gets picked then they get to choose a prize out of the treasure chest. Now, what makes this neat is how she goes about revealing who was randomly pulled out of the box. She says this person is a him or a her, or a he or a she. Then she’ll say something like, this person has three syllables in their name. She pauses, letting them think about their own names, and the names of their classmates. Then she’ll say, this person’s name starts with the 6th letter of the alphabet. Each time is a little different, but I love the syllables portion. Sometimes the students guess wrong. Mrs. Vega will say, “You think so, let’s clap it.” The kids enjoy getting prizes but they also enjoy figuring out who gets a prize.

I remember syllables being a frustrating topic in school. It was my mother who made it interesting for me. We didn’t do clapping in school, we simply had to count the syllables on our fingers. My mother had me do clapping. After a while the clapping got boring so we switched to tapping, snapping, head bobbing, and using simple musical tunes. We wouldn’t sing the words, we would speak the words with rhythm, much like the character Professor Henry Higgins played by Rex Harrison in the movie My Fair Lady. That was fun. I was also shown how to separate words out by their syllables. My mother showed me how the dictionary does that very same thing at the time as telling a user how to pronounce a word. There was some disparity there however because the way we speak and the proper pronunciation of words, and consequently the number of syllables in a word are different. A common one is the word family. When we speak we often say fam-ly. However it should be fam-i-ly. While one can come to grips with the commonality of lazy speech it gets particularly annoying in poetry where syllable count matters. I remember reading a free verse poem where the poet had three line stanzas in a 7-12-7 pattern, if I recall correctly. I do not remember what the poem was about, but what do recall was seeing the word family at the end of a line and immediately thinking the poet had gone over the syllable count. Then it occurred to me that the poet was using fam-ly not fam-i-ly. This inconsistency is something to watch out for, especially when you start having your students write Haiku’s. I recall seeing in my daughter’s Kindergarten class at the end of the year the teacher asked the kids to provide words to figure out the syllables to. One child said family. Guess how many syllables they clapped together? Yep, you guessed it. Two. I silently twitched out of politeness.

My mother is a musician, which is probably where she got the idea to incorporate rhythm songs with syllables, and as such she passed on some of that musicianship to me. Because of this background I found the beats analogy annoying since the length of sounds are not taken into account. For example, take the long a. It takes a bit longer to say the word “shake” then it does to say the word, “can”, but both constitute one beat. In music if the quarter note gets the beat and the note lasts longer than a quarter note then the note does not equal one beat, it’s two beats or a beat and a half. If you say, “Will you shake this for me?” the word shake lasts longer than the other single syllable words. So why is shake only one syllable and not one and a half? It is also longer than the other words. The length of a word, according to Cunningham, is supposed to be a clue in about how many syllables a word has. (2009). Yet, at the same time, you can have a four letter word that has two syllables such as “very.” The word very has four letters, the word shake has five letters, but “shake” is monosyllabic while “very” is disyllabic.

In essence I believe that a teacher needs to consider these issues when teaching the concept of syllables. It needs to stay novel. After a while clapping gets boring, so shake it up with other syllabic activities. Some students need to see how the word is broken up into syllables. They also need to be made aware that there is more to figuring out the number of syllables than the way we speak and how many letters a word has. This is where seeing the word broken up syllabically can be of great help in the classrooms. It can also lead to discussions on why there is such a difference between the spoken word and proper pronunciation. We want the subject to be engaging, not an eye roller. If it weren’t for my mother I probably would have thought of syllables as one more dreaded thing to deal with at school. Instead it was something I understood and could help struggling classmates with.

Cunningham, P. M. (2009). Phonics They Use: Words for Reading and Writing. 5th edition. Allyn & Bacon: Pearson Education.

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