After your child has mastered the alphabetic principle, the next step in learning to read is beginning blending. This means pushing all of the sounds together in a word to create the whole word without pausing. For example, reading the word ‘bat’ as /bbaatt/ instead of /b/…./a/…../t/. Beginning blending is a really important step in learning to read, and therefore must be taught to a child explicitly. How do you teach beginning blending? On today’s post I am going to share with you tips and strategies on how to teach beginning blending to your child.
Teaching Letters and Sounds in Isolation
Before you begin teaching your child beginning blending, you will want to make sure that they know all of their letters and sounds in the alphabet. Want to test it? Show your child a lower case letter card and ask him/her to say the name of the letter and the sound that it makes.
Say, “When I hold up a letter, say the letter’s name and give its sound.”
Does your child not have this step mastered? Then you will need to first backtrack and start there. Teach each letter and sound in isolation first, before you begin teaching beginning blending.
See my post>>> How to Teach Letters and Sounds
Pre- Blending Activity
I like to start out by showing the children the difference between choppy and fluent reading.
I do this by having the children first say some sounds slowly and stretched out, then say the same sounds at a quicker speed. This way when the child starts to blend words, you can remind them that we read the words quickly and not stretched out.
Teacher: “Say mmmaaannnn” (The word man stretched out slowly.)
Child repeats “mmmaaannn.”
Teacher: “Now say it quickly.”
Child says “man.”
Repeat this activity with the following words:
hit, tub, pig, jet, hen, ham, fox, bus, rat
Teach Beginning Blending
When your child is ready to begin blending the letters together to form words, you will need a set of letter/sound cards. You can make these by writing each lowercase letter on a separate index card.
You are going to split the letter/sound cards into 3 piles:
In the left pile place the letters:
c, f, g, h, j, k, l, r, s, w, y, z
In the middle pile place the letters:
a, e, i, o, u
In the right pile place the letters:
b, d, m, n, p, t, v, x
Have your child point to each Sound Card with their pointer finger from left to right and say the sound aloud while pointing to it. They will then swipe their finger from left to right (under the letters) while blending the sounds into a word.
You will flip the cards from the different columns to make different combinations.
Most of the words that your child blends will be nonsense words. Reading nonsense words is really important because if a child can read unfamiliar words, it shows that they are not memorizing words but are actually using beginning blending skills.
I made a short YouTube Video for you on how to teach beginning blending.
>>>Click HERE to watch the video<<<
If your child is having difficulties…
Check out the PRIDE Reading Program. This curriculum is structured, systematic, cumulative and highly repetitive. It is really easy to use, 100% scripted and very affordable. Some kids just need a different approach to learning.
Thank you for reading my post today!
