Have you ever listened to your child read out loud? Did he sound out each word correctly? Or did he ask how to say a lot of the words? This may be a sign that your child needs to work on his word decoding skills.

Word decoding skills are what we use to break apart words into syllables. When a child properly decodes a word than they are able to properly read and pronounce a word. However, by incorrectly decoding a word, the child will fail to read the word correctly and will often fail to recognize a word that he knows in his spoken vocabulary.

Most schools do well at teaching children what a syllable is, however, many schools do not teach explicit rules about syllables. Thus, children are usually taught what a syllable is, but they are rarely taught how to correctly break a word down into syllables.

This happens because many teachers weren’t taught explicit rules about syllables themselves. Many people believe that English is a complicated and inconsistent language, and thus there are not explicit rules that can be taught to children to help them have a dependable way to decode new and difficult words.

However, although the rules of the English language are rarely taught, they do exist. There are consistent rules and consistent exceptions. Learn some of these explicit rules now! ›