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!
DISTAR READING PROGRAM WORKSHEETS HOW TO
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. The teacher side of me kicked in and whispered, "You know, some supplemental activities that added more sound/letter recognition would be really nice.Have you seen what I've seen? A young student tries to read an unknown word such as "cat" and says. Sample worksheet from the "After Ten" packet I also included black and white options for those who prefer to print these out at home without using up their color cartridges: With nice colorful imagery, in case someone wants to print it out, laminate it and reuse it over and over (which would really be helpful).
Sample worksheet from the "After Five" packet And what I really wanted, was something more like this: But even the way the sound for "A" is introduced is a challenge, as in the "100 Easy Lessons" book, it looks different than most lowercase A's do in Kindergarten workbooks. If you are familiar with "How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", you'll remember that sound introduction happens in a different order than the ABC's are usually introduced. When I used this program before, I wanted practice sheets for the writing part of the program.