Learning how to count syllables in words is a skill for kindergarten through third grade. Here are 8 syllablesactivitiesready to print and use in a classroom. You’ll find a syllables counter activity like sorting syllables, Holiday vocabulary words and a syllable worksheet are all included.

As always, the Teach Junkie English/Language Arts (ELA) section is growing in numbers of pictured tutorials and collections with free lesson plans for how to teach reading so you can always search there if you’’re looking for something different. {wink}

Counting Syllables

1. Sight Word Syllable Sort and Graph – Work on both language arts and math with this combination activity for third grade. Read and sort based on the number of syllables, record onto graph sheet. (no longer available)

2. Counting Syllables – This beginning book is designed for kindergarten or first grade. Illustrate and use colored stickers to show the number of syllables for the main image.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills by Grade Level (Elementary) The following documents provide the elementary TEKS compiled by grade level: Kindergarten (PDF, 289KB) Grade 1 (PDF, 302KB) Grade 2 (PDF, 342KB) Grade 3 (PDF, 351KB) Grade 4 (PDF, 350KB) Grade 5 (PDF, 347KB). Grade 3 Decoding Multisyllable Words Worksheets Related ELA Standard: RF.3.3.C. Answer Keys Here. If spot a word that possesses more than a single syllable it is.

Holiday Themed Syllable Activities

3. Valentine Syllable Activity – Sort the Valentine vocabulary word stamps into 1, 2 and 3 syllable columns.

4. Fabulous Fall Syllables – A combination of fall words for Halloween all the way through Thanksgiving, students sort word cards into piles.

5. Sorting Suess Syllables – Sort Seuss themed words with a wocket in my pocket or two.

• James said Utah has nearly 10 drive-up testing sites as part of the program and hopes to get a similar number set up in Iowa's case. 'It's safer for the frontline workers certainly,' James said.
• Browse our categories to find the worksheet you are looking for or use search option on the top to search for any worksheet you need. Once you find your worksheet, just click on the Open in new window arrow mark on the top right corner of the that worksheet to print or download.

6. Holiday Syllable Sort – Lots of December Holidays are all represented in this sort.

Seasonal Syllable Printables

7. Apples and Fall Syllable Cards – Word cards all relating to apples and picking apples makes this fast to print.

8. Winter Vocabulary Worksheet – Get students clapping and using tally marks while they complete this worksheet.

With these eight printables and lesson ideas, your students will each be a syllable counter in no time!

Thanks talented teachers – your free printable activities and picture tutorials are great! Feel free to share your “I’m a Featured Teach Junkie” badge on your blog, facebook or instagram. You earned it! {{high fives}}

Share your writing lesson plan idea here on Teach Junkie. We love hearing from teachers, teacher-bloggers and from you! Join the Teach Junkie Community and be a part of this collaborative blog.

P.S. Don’’t forget to check out the Teach Junkie Facebook page. It’s a great place to ask questions on how to make things or for specific lesson ideas/collections that you are looking for. I’ll be happy to find them for you.

Have You Seen?

Summary: Cloze Tests provide empirical evidence of how easy a text is to read and understand for a specified target audience. They thus measure reading comprehension, and not just a readability score.

Sidebar to Jakob Nielsen's column on Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult, Feb. 2011.

It's easy to estimate the difficulty of your content: simply run the text through a readability formula. The resulting number is the reading level, usually stated as a grade level that corresponds to the number of years of formal education that are required to understand the text.

There are many different readability formulas, but most people use Flesch-Kincaid simply because it's built into Microsoft Word (In some Word versions, it can be found under Tools > Spelling and Grammar panel > Options: Grammar: Show readability statistics). For example, Flesch-Kincaid rates this article at an 11th-grade reading level, meaning that it can be read by high-school seniors — people who've already completed 11 years of education.

Unless you're a readability expert, the differences between formulas don't matter much, so just use whatever is close at hand. When we assess a website's copy, it doesn't matter whether it computes at, say, 11.3 or 11.6. In either case, that's a high-school reading level, meaning that it's too difficult for a mainstream site but acceptable for a site targeting business professionals. (When targeting a broad consumer audience, you should write at an 8^th-grade reading level.)

Readability vs. Comprehension

Readability rates the text's complexity in terms of words and grammar, but we're actually more interested in the text's difficulty in terms of reader comprehension of the content. Sad to say, no formula can measure whether users understand your site.

Take, for example, the following two sentences:

27 Closed Syllablesthird Grade James Testing

1. He waved his hands.
2. He waived his rights.

Both score well in readability formulas: simple words, short sentences. But whereas everybody understands what the first sentence describes, you might need a law degree to fully comprehend the implications of the second sentence.

(This hands/rights example comes from the paper by Singh et al. discussed in my main column.)

In addition to pure literacy skills, comprehension depends on a mix of IQ, education, and background knowledge. Thus, to measure comprehension, you must test with real users from your target audience.

Cloze Test Procedure

The Cloze test is a common empirical comprehension test. It works as follows:

1. Replace every Nth word in the text with blanks. A typical test uses N = 6, but you can make the test easier by using a higher N value.
2. Ask your test participants to read the modified text and fill in the blanks with their best guesses as to the missing words. Each person should work alone.
3. The score is the percentage of correctly guessed words. Because you're testing comprehension rather than spelling skills, synonyms and misspellings are allowed.

If users get 60% or more right on average, you can assume the text is reasonably comprehensible for the specified user profile employed to recruit test participants. There's a clear difference between readability scores and comprehension scores:

• Readability is a property of the text itself and predicts the education level typically needed for people to read the content without undue difficulty.
• Comprehension is a combined property of the text and a specific user segment and indicates whether this target audience actually understands the material's meaning.

Here's an example, using a paragraph from Facebook's privacy policy:

Site activity information. We keep {1}______ of some of the actions {2}______ take on Facebook, such as {3}______ connections (including joining a group {4}______ adding a friend), creating a {5}______ album, sending a gift, poking {6}______ user, indicating you “like” a {7}______, attending an event, or connecting {8}______ an application. In some cases {9}______ are also taking an action {10}______ you provide information or content {11}______ us. For example, if you {12}______ a video, in addition to {13}______ the actual content you uploaded, {14}______ might log the fact that {15}______ shared it.

(Solution at the bottom of this page.)

27 Closed Syllablesthird Grade James Test Answers

The full text — before inserting the blanks — scored at a 14^th -grade reading level, corresponding to having completed 2 years of university. Thus, if you're a typical smart Alertbox reader, you can probably understand the paragraph and complete the Cloze test. Still, this is a higher reading level than what's required for much of the younger Facebook audience. Most teenage users need far easier text, and even college students prefer non-college level text when they're online — leisure sites shouldn't feel like textbooks.

Solution to Sample Cloze Test

Don't peek, if you want a go at solving the Cloze test on your own.

27 Closed Syllablesthird Grade James Test

Here are the missing words from the sample paragraph:

{1} track
{2} you
{3} adding
{4} or
{5} photo
{6} another
{7} post
{8} with
{9} you
{10} when
{11} to
{12} share
{13} storing
{14} we
{15} you

27 Closed Syllablesthird Grade James Tests

Did you get at least 9 of these right (corresponding to 60%)? If so, you can probably comprehend the full text fairly easily. If you got a lower score, that doesn't prove that you're stupid or that the text is densely written. The problem is likely to be a lack of contextual knowledge of Facebook. For example, the word 'poking' is generally easy enough to understand, but its meaning in the Facebook privacy policy context is completely incomprehensible unless you're a user. (Which is okay, because any given text needs to be comprehensible only to the target audience.)

Read more in the separate article Legibility, Readability, and Comprehension: Making Users Read Your Words.

Full Report

27 Closed Syllablesthird Grade James Test Papers

Full eyetracking report on how people read on the web is available for download.