“I’ve pushed the learning of letter sounds all year, but my child is still struggling with blending.”
“Blending has been a challenge and my child is getting frustrated with it. We‘ve decided to go back to the letter sounds.”
When I hear things like this my answer is always “Blend! Blend! Blend!”
I say this because I don’t believe we do enough of it. Is it because we feel it is too difficult for young children to achieve? Or is it just easier for us to allow children to simply over-learn the letter-sound correspondences in isolation?
Either way, it can’t be overlooked; blending is a crucial skill that every child needs to start developing early, making sure your child masters oral blending, before moving to the actual reading of words.
What is Blending?
Blending is the skill that helps us read, especially when confronted with unfamiliar words. For young children, most words are unfamiliar and they will need to blend many of the words they encounter. It involves pushing together the sounds of the letters in the word in order to create the whole word. For example, a child trying to read the word ‘cat’, will isolate each of the letter sounds. When these three sounds are said in sequence, the word ‘cat’ is spoken.
How Do We Teach Blending?
Blending is not a difficult skill to master. It simply requires PRACTICE and lots of it. It’s critical to introduce children to the phonemic awareness skills of oral blending at an early age. Modelling how to orally blend to create a spoken word and how to break a word apart is how to start a child’s blending and segmenting journey.
Once children can blend at an oral level, the blending of words in print becomes a lot easier.
The key is to ALWAYS incorporate blending activities when teaching letter sounds. Do not wait until all the sounds of the alphabet are done. After a handful of sounds have been learned, words can be blended. Take the following group of letter sounds:
After only these 8 letter sounds are taught, you can begin teaching your child to blend words such as given below:
Now, if you observe the list above, these are not random words I’ve picked, but the words are comprised of only the 8 sounds that the child has been taught. This is known as practicing reading with decodable text or based on the child’s current literacy skill level. This is a very important aspect of ‘The Synthetic Phonics Framework’.
Top 5 Tips To Help Your Child Master Blending
1. Immerse your child in oral blending as early as you can.
This can be done through games such as:
- I Spy. E.g. “I can spy with my little eye a h-a-t.” – and let your child blend these sounds to say ‘hat’.
- Lesson breakers – while giving an instruction break one of the words into isolated sounds: “Can you please put this in the /b/-/a/-/g/?” or “Put the /c/-/u/-/p/ on the table.” (please do not blend the selected words). My daughter loved hearing me do this. What I was doing was modelling the spelling strategy while she was practising blending.
- Oral bingo – My daughter developed blending because she became proficient at oral blending. I also like to use this with older children who are having difficulty with the blending strategy.
2. Grab some magnetic letters
Grap some magnetic letters and physically show the letters crashing into each other as you blend the word. This visual representation of blending can often be that ‘lightbulb moment’ for a child where blending starts to make sense.
3. Always have pictures ready for the words your child is blending.
These pictures are not there to encourage guessing but as a confirmation after blending. This will help them blend easily because they can see the spoken word that has been formed through the pictures. Eventually, blending becomes automatic and pictures will not be needed.
4. If the child is not saying the correct word
when blending isolated sounds, try these other blending techniques:
- Isolated blending – say the first sound the loudest and then get softer as you get to the end of the word. Children do tend to start blending with the loudest sound they heard. So make sure your first sound is the loudest.
- Final blending – blend the first two letter sounds together and then snap it with the final letter sound. For example:
This helps with children who are not following through with their blending or with those who just cannot hear the spoken word being formed. - Smooth blending – stretch the word in a continuous flow of sounds, without a pause or disconnection in between. The mantra is to elongate or stretch the vowel sound a little. For example:
I find that most children who struggle with blending get it with this technique.
5. Blend! Blend! Persevere! Blend! Blend!
These skills of blending and segmenting do not develop automatically. They must be modelled and explicitly taught. Don’t give up and your child will reap the rewards of your perseverance.
Older Children who are Struggling with Blending
It can feel like a real challenge for parents who has a child who can’t blend ‘cat’ and also those who are reading chapter books! For these older children, it’s often the same issues the beginning reader is having.
In this instance, firstly, don’t soldier on with learning more complicated sounds (two-letter digraphs or three-letter trigraphs or other complex sounds), you will be overloading a child’s working memory.
Go back and start with the basic single letter sounds.
Next, check their phonological and phonemic awareness skills. These are the underlying skills that a child needs to make the ‘blending penny drop’.
Go back to the basics. You might need to stop blending with letters and go back to oral blending. It may feel like you are going backwards if the child is much older but this skill needs to be firmly embedded.
Ask yourself, are you teaching where they are at, or where they should be?
For 99% of children the blending penny will drop – it just needs lots of modelling, repetition, practice and a steadfast determination that every child will learn to read!
