My alphabet placemat was reviewed by Jill Farris on her blog, Generational Womanhood. Check it out: Generationalwomanhood.wordpress.com

Once children learn a word, they become more and more automatic at recognizing it with repeated exposure to it. After a while it becomes something like a logo, recognized instantly. The more words a reader recognizes automatically, the more fluently the reader will be able to read the text.

All around me my college classmates started reciting the attendance list along with our distinguished English Literature professor. OK, he began every class calling out that same list of names and recording our attendance.

What Makes This Alphabet Special?

Now we have just one syllable type left on the poster, the r-controlled syllable. This pattern has one or more vowels, followed by r. This syllable pattern is also not very common. You might call letter r “super r,” or “bossy r” to help students remember that this consonant has a strong impact on the preceding vowels.

A vowel team syllable usually has two vowels working together to make the vowel sound for a syllable. There are some teams that include consonants too, such as igh, eigh, and ough. Although this syllable pattern isn’t very common in English, many of the words that contain teams are common everyday words.

Once the closed, open, and magic e syllables have been mastered, a reader is ready to tackle the remaining three patterns. These patterns occur much less frequently in our language, but two of them have some pesky details to master.

I briefly introduced open syllables in my former blog on closed syllables. An open syllable has one vowel at the end of a word, or of a syllable in a word. Closed and open syllables make up about 75 percent of the syllables in the English language. Combined with magic e, it’s up to about 85 percent.

When people talk about patterns they often think of colors. Red, blue, red, blue, etc. Maybe red-blue-green, red-blue-green. Maybe they think of numbers, 1, 2, 1, 2, or geometric designs. But how often do they think about words?

The upper left graphic on the Six Syllable Types poster represents the closed syllable pattern, the one we often start with. Closed Syllables are represented by the letter v on my syllable poster.