Rather than saying each sound separately until the end of the word is reached, blend sounds cumulatively, continuously, or “successively” to read the word, as Isabel Beck puts it in Making Sense of Phonics: The Hows and Whys. If a beginning or struggling reader you are working with doesn’t intuitively know what is meant by “Put the sounds together,” or “Blend the sounds,” or the ubiquitous, “Sound it out,” then try the Blend As You Read approach…. The Blend As You Read Approach to Teach a Child to Read May a lifetime of questions about blending be covered here. Then, I’ll elaborate more deeply on issues and research surrounding differing strategies for teaching decoding and blending sounds, as well as tricks for the toughest cases. A little shortcut for you to avoid all the troubles I’ve dealt with!įirst, I’ll dive right into the sure-fire solution to most every blending problem. Given all the pitfalls with decoding and blending that I’ve encountered over the years, I’ve designed this Ultimate Guide to Teach Blending Sounds in Words for you here. The Ultimate Guide to Teach Blending Sounds in WordsĪfter having worked with hundreds of students that I have personally tutored, as well as thousands of teachers of reading, I realize that teaching blending is a vital pedagogical skill for quickly advancing any beginning or struggling reader. So, whether you work with beginning kindergarten students who can’t blend CVC words, or you work with 4th graders who can’t blend words with multisyllable words, you’ll find The Solution here for all types of blending challenges. The good news is that even though this Works-100%-Of-The-Time Solution is not widely ’s surprisingly simple! YET, blending sounds to read words is the MOST important strategy for learning how to recognize words. The bad news is that a sizable minority of students-both beginning and struggling readers-do not rapidly pick up this blending skill. For instance, in the example above the child learning to read who is blending well would preferably say: THAT is the exact reason for this article about how to teach blending sounds to read words.īlending sounds to read words is the process of translating letters to sounds.and then combining, or blending, those sounds to identify a written word. Have you seen what I've seen? A young student tries to read an unknown word such as 'cat' and says.

Formula three phonics program