Teaching syllable types: open and closed syllables transcript

Elaine Stanley:

Now, once students recognise short and long vowel sounds, then they can learn about open and closed syllables in one-syllable words. These are our first two syllable types that we looked at.

This snip here is from our spelling generalisations document. Here is a link for you.

https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/search/spelling-generalisations-syllable-division-and-morphology/

What this tells us is that in an open syllable, the vowel is not followed by a consonant, so it can make its big, long sound. I often say to students, ‘It's open, there's nothing after it, so it can make its big, long sound. And in a closed syllable, the vowel is followed by one or more consonants, so it's sort of squashed in and it can only make its short sound.’

We'll demonstrate that now. You can do an activity like this where you can ask three students to come out to the front of the class, and one of them gets to be the very special royal person. They can even have a little crown and be the royal vowel. And then the other two are the royal guards. Okay. What we would do, they're going to work out what the vowel sound is in each word. Then I would say to the first person, ‘This is your letter. So can you tell me the letter?’ And they would say, ‘n’. ‘What sound does it make?’ ‘/n/.’ Okay. Now, Kerrie, you're going to be our royal vowel today. And they love being the royal vowel.

Teacher:

Now, we know your letter can make two sounds. Which two sounds can that make?

Student:

/o/ and /ō/.

Teacher:

All right. We're going to work out which sound it's going to make in this first word we're making. And then the third person has t and says, ‘It makes /t/.’ Kerrie, what sound is your letter going to make in this word?

Student:

/o/.

Teacher:

And why does it make that short /o/ sound?

Student:

Because it is closed in, and so it can only make its short /o/ sound.

Teacher:

Right. It's closed in. It hasn't got room for its big, long sound. It's going to make its short sound. All right. Let's sound out this word.

Teacher and student:

/n/, /o/, /t/. Not.

Teacher:

That's right. So, if this guard on the end has another special job to do somewhere in the palace and he goes away and we take away his letter, what happens now? What sound will your letter make now, Kerrie?

Student:

/ō/.

Teacher:

And why does it make its long sound this time?

Student:

Because it's got lots of open space, so it can make that long sound.

Teacher:

That's right. Let's sound out our word now.

Teacher and student:

/n/, /ō/. No.

Teacher:

Okay. Beautiful.

Elaine Stanley:

You can do that activity lots of times with these sorts of words. We've just demonstrated ‘not’ to ‘no’, taking away the t and you change the vowel sound. You can do the same with ‘got’ and ‘go’, ‘hem’ and ‘he’, all of those ones there. Even when students start to learn about consonant digraphs, you can include words like ‘shed’ and take away the d, and then it makes ‘she’.

This is particularly useful for students to learn when they start reading at the text level or the sentence level because you often get those simple open-syllable words like ‘no’ and ‘he’ and ‘go’ in their text that they're reading, so they learn to apply the right vowel sound.