When your child knows their letters sounds, but can’t manage to read a word without guessing or dissolving into tears, it is so frustrating for both of you. As parents, blending seems so simple in our minds, so why is it so hard to explain?! The good news is, you can easily teach your child to read words after they learn letters. Let’s teach them to blend!
Blending is the ability to smoothly combine letter sounds into words.
For many kids, blending is not intuitive. It’s really tricky to transition from learning letters to the next step, blending words. You child needs to be explicitly taught how to blend words and sentences. The good news is, you can break down blending into simple steps. With repetition, this process will become more and more automatic for your child. Games are the best way to reinforce this skill, because they offer fun opportunities to practice the same patterns repeatedly.
My biggest piece of advice for you is to not move on too soon. Don’t move onto the next phonics skill, don’t focus on anything else until your child has mastered blending CVC words quickly and easily. Hold off on tricky words like the, said, and you until your child grasps blending CVC words.
CVC words follow a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. (jug, lap, red, etc) The vowel is short because this is a closed syllable. It is essential that your child masters this pattern because so many words are made from closed syllables: picnic, running, uncommon. It’s foundational to all the other phonics skills.
The majority of parents will teach their child their letter sounds, and then ask their child to “sound out” words. What the parent means is say each sound in the word, usually with a pause between the sounds. Then the child will try to blend those sounds together and repeat the word. For some children, this clicks right away and they start reading words. For others, this results in a few difficulties:
- Saying the sounds in a word but not being able to say the word itself
- Slow blending
- Mixing up sounds
- Guessing
- Saying every word twice (one time to sound it out, one time to blend it) and then struggling through sentences because of that repetition
If you are just starting out with teaching your child to read, or you want to improve their ability to read words, then don’t teach them to say each sound (with pauses in between) and then repeat the word.
Instead, teach continuous blending!
With continuous blending, we teach kiddos to drag the sounds of the word together! Teach your kiddo to connect the sounds in words and it will fix a whole host of problems!
First, simplify the process by taking letters out of the equation. You have to keep in mind that when your child is reading these short words they are doing two things at once: remembering letter sounds and blending them together. When you take letters off the table you can teach your child how to blend the sounds out loud. Focusing on this skill separately simplifies the reading process. When they can easily blend sounds out loud, it makes blending them when reading so much easier. Take any word with 2 sounds and give them to your child one at a time, having them repeat. Try “/i/ /f/, what’s the word? If!” Then do the same with 3 sound words: “/p/ /a/ /t/ what’s the word? Pat!”
Once they have mastered that skill, then you can bring letters back into play, and that’s when continuous blending comes into play.
The goal is to drag the sounds together by stretching the vowel. I tell kids “keep your motor running!” Pretend your mouth is a car and you have to keep the motor running, or the sound coming out, until you reach the end of the word. When you put the word in front of them, model dragging your finger under the letters, and dragging them together with your voice. So for a word like “at”, you would say aaaaaaat! Slide their finger along the word and have them stretch it out like you. Focus on blending without saying the word twice.
You can download my free blending mat with that “keep your motor running” theme! Just grab a small car to make it playful and tactile for your little! Grab it here!
When they have mastered 2 sound words and can say them quickly, do the same with 3 sound words. Once again, drag your finger and stretch out the vowel. If your child has difficulty connecting the first 2 sounds you can try consonants that are stretchy, like m, r, l, n, v, f, z and s. This will allow you to say the sounds slowly sssssiiiiitttt. The more you model gliding your finger under the words and blending them together, and having your child do the same, the faster and easier it will be for them to connect the sounds.
If your child still has difficulty connecting 3 sounds, try successive blending. For some kids it is really difficult to keep all 3 sounds in their head initially. With successive blending, you cover up the last sound and just combine the first 2. Then say it again and add the last sound. Once your child is doing this successfully, switch back to continuous blending.
One of the main elements of this skill is repetition. If your child can blend sounds out loud, eventually it will click when they are doing it on paper. So you need to practice words often in a low pressure way until they can automatically and quickly blend cvc words. Games are the best way to expose your child to the cvc pattern often! Most books (except a few really decodable ones) will have a lot of different phonics patterns in them, but you want to only focus on the cvc pattern initially.
In Play to Read Plus, I teach parents how to use continuous blending with the goal of mastering words with games! With video lessons for foundations and monthly games for each phonics skill, teaching your child to read has never been simpler!
Happy Reading! -Delainey
