Closed Syllables and 8 Strategies to Teach Them: Phonics Rules for Teachers Episode 10

Closed syllables are the first syllable type you should teach your students. But, what exactly is a closed syllable, why should you teach closed syllables first, and how can you help your students understand them?

A classroom teacher with 10 years of experience, Martha Moore hosts the Phonics Rules for Teachers Podcast. Drawing from her personal journey, she shares insights on transitioning from traditional teaching methods to a phonics-centered approach and the impact it has on students' reading and writing.

Each week , Martha shares a simple phonics rule, strategy, or background information and how you can teach it in your classroom.

You can find the How the Heck to Teach 'Em supplementary resource to go along with this series here: https://www.myprimaryparadise.com/shop/phonics-rules-resources/

Transcript

Welcome back to Episode 10 of Phonics Rules for Teachers and How the Heck to Teach Them. I'm Martha, and today we are going to take an in-depth look at my favorite all-time syllable type, which is the closed syllable. If you've been following along, we've already talked about what syllables are and why it's important to teach them. I've also briefly talked about the different syllable types and I've shared how to teach syllables generally. Today we're going to look really closely at the closed syllable and how we can teach this syllable type to our students.

Closed syllables are the first syllable type that you should be teaching your students after they have learned short vowel sounds and also at least a handful of consonants. Let's start with the basics: what is a closed syllable? A closed syllable is a syllable that has a single vowel letter—A, E, I, O, or U—followed by one or more consonants. In a closed syllable, the vowel sound is almost always a short vowel sound: a, e, i, o, or u. Closed syllables follow a very clear and logical pattern. We have a single vowel letter that makes a short sound followed by one or more consonants. You can quickly determine if a syllable is closed by looking for this pattern. If you see two or more vowels in a syllable or a vowel followed by an "r," that is not a closed syllable.

Closed syllables make up 50% of the syllables in the English language, so this is a great syllable type to start with your students. It follows a clear pattern, it contains short vowels—which are the first vowel type that you typically would teach your students—and it makes up 50% of the syllables, which means that once they understand the closed syllable, they are able to read and write a very large number of words.

Let's take a look at some examples of closed syllables and not closed syllables. Some examples of closed syllables are: at, wed, pitch, not, glum, scratch. Some examples of words that are not closed syllables are: art, weed, peach, no, glue, screech. As you can see, closed syllables can have between two and seven letters, and CVC words, which are often the first words that children can read and write, are closed syllables.

Let's quickly talk about the exceptions to the closed syllable rule. You might be thinking, "But what about the wild, old cult who runs the most in my mind?" Martha, first of all, excellent sentence. I'm very impressed with you putting that all together. Thank you very much. Second, all of those spelling patterns in words like "old," "wild," "most," and "mind" are exceptions to the closed syllable rule. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to teach closed syllables. It just means that later on, you should specifically teach those spelling patterns to your students and explain that those are spelling patterns that follow a different rule. And those spelling patterns are not nearly as common as closed syllables, which again make up 50% of the syllables in English. So those words, while they are exceptions to the closed syllable rule, they do follow their own pattern, and there are many words that follow that pattern as well. So you teach those spelling patterns separately, and when they come up, you can let your students know.

What do students need to know before you teach them closed syllables? One, they need to understand the difference between letters and sounds. They also need to understand the difference between consonants and vowels. They need to be able to hear and count syllables orally in a word, and they need to be able to read and write at least a few consonant and short vowel sounds. Once students have mastered those skills, they are ready to learn about closed syllables. Even if they only know the sounds for the letters "s," "a," "t," "p," "i," "n," you can begin to introduce closed syllables with words like "at," "pin," "sip," "tap."

Now let's take a look at eight ways to teach closed syllables to your students.

1. Use the closed door visual. If you've taught short vowel sounds, you have hopefully taught your students that when we make a short vowel sound with our mouth, our mouth only does one motion, which is to open. Most English words end with a closed mouth; therefore, in a closed syllable, we use a consonant after a short vow to help us close our mouth. You can use the visual of a house with a closed door like this. You can write a VC or a CVC word like "in" or "cat" on the house and then put the consonant on the closed door. Explain that a closed syllable has a single short vow followed by one or more consonants. You can also use hand motions that are associated with the idea of a door being closed to help students understand the concept of closed syllables. In my classroom, I like to use this chant: I say it and they repeat it. "Closed syllables have one vowel letter and end with a consonant." I find hand motions to be incredibly helpful when students are first using this concept.
2. Tell students the fact. My students are always so excited to know that 50% of syllables in the English language are created using closed syllables. This will help them to feel more motivated and excited about the fact that learning the syllable type will unlock so many words that they will be able to read and write.
3. Practice with word mapping. I've talked a lot about word mapping in the past, but as you're learning the closed syllable, take some words, map them together, and it will help students understand and solidify that pattern in their brain.
4. Practice with word sorts by vowel sound. The more that you work with words and encourage students to look closely at the letters and the patterns we see in words, the easier it will be for them to read and write closed syllable words. A great way to practice this is to have students sort words by closed syllable vowel sounds. If they've learned short "a" and short "i," for example, you can have them practice sorting VC and CVC words. Be sure to discuss and point out the closed syllable pattern as they're sorting the words. This can be a great activity to complete with word cards, or you can even have them take a whiteboard and write an "i" and an "a" on each side, and then as you orally say words, you can count out the sounds and have them sort them to the correct side. This allows them to practice both their decoding and their encoding skills.
5. Practice with labeling closed syllable words. You can do this both together in small groups or have students work on this independently. Once you've practiced together some, show students some closed syllable words and have them draw a small "v" underneath the vowels and a "c" underneath the consonants. They should look for that pattern where we see a single short vow followed by one or more consonants. They can practice labeling and then practice reading the words.
6. Let students hunt for closed syllable words in books from your classroom library. This is exactly what it sounds like. Give students one or two books and have them look through the books and then write down or mark with a sticky note all of the closed syllable words that they can find. Depending on how many words are in the book, they might find many words, or if it's a book with fewer words, they might not find as many. Then have students share out the words that they found, and you can look at them together as a class and decide: Is it a closed syllable, or maybe it's something that we need to look at closer because it's not, and we need to do a bit of reteaching. This is a really fun activity, and it also gives them the chance to look through real books and see that the words that they are learning are in the books that they enjoy reading as well.
7. Let them be the teacher. One of the best ways to fully understand a concept is when you are asked to teach it to someone else. Once you practice closed syllables in class, you can give your students the chance to do just that. Let your students become the teacher. They could either take the activity home and teach someone at home, or you could pair up with another class in your own school and have them share their knowledge with other students. First, help them create a cheat sheet of teacher notes so that they can use it to teach, sort of like a little mini lesson plan. Then they can explain and teach what they have learned about closed syllables, showing them examples to their students. Finally, they can give their students a small task and take a look together at the end to see if the students were able to find and give examples of closed syllable words.
8. Continue to review closed syllables as you learn new syllable types. One of the cool things about learning syllable types is you can compare different syllable types to each other, and it makes it really interesting as you're learning about the English language. As you introduce open syllables, silent E syllables, and so on, you will continuously go back and compare them with the closed syllable types. As you're looking at new words that begin to combine different types of syllables, you are going to continue to go back and talk about how do we know that this syllable is a closed syllable.

Understanding closed syllables is a really important step in your students' phonics journey. Now I hope you feel ready to go out there and teach closed syllables to your students. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Don't forget to leave a comment below if you have any questions. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode of Phonics Rules for Teachers and How the Heck to Teach Them. I'm Martha. Thanks for joining me.