Are you curious about how to teach you children how to blend words so they can get on with their reading journey? Have you been pulling out your hair, stressing both you and your child out with the desire for them to learn how to read? Well I’d like to share something with you that will clarify how you can effortlessly navigate this process. As a kindergarten teacher my job was to make sure my little ones had the skills needed to make first grade achievable for them. So I kept certain things in mind and I’ll share those with your below.
What is Blending?
Blending is the ability to “push together” letter sounds to form a singular word. Though it sounds quite simple it is slightly more complex than that, as you may know.
Why is blending important?
Blending allows children to read new words. It’s a skill that allows children to expand their reading vocabulary form merely memorizing words to being able to tackle unfamiliar words.
So if this is so important, how do I teach my child how to blend letters?
In a word? Practice. Yup. Like most things in early childhood repetition is the name of the game. Children need multiple tries at skills to be able to master them. Now before you go all drill and kill let’s take a deeper look at how to go about giving your child this needed practice.
1) Start with phonemic awareness
Having a firm handle on phonemic awareness skills allows children to be able to easily connect sounds to letters. Once children are able to manipulate and play with sounds, adding letters that represent these sounds is the next logical step. However, if your child does not have sound phonemic awareness skills trying to teach reading is setting both of you up for an uphill battle. So make sure they have had ample opportunities to play with sounds by listening to, identifying and sorting sounds they hear in their environment, by learning poems and songs and being able to isolate, blend, and segments sounds without letters.
2) Use an effective letter order
Introduce letter sounds in an order that increases the practice time children have as they work through the alphabet. SATPIN gives children access to many words by learning only these first six letter sounds.
3) Use visual prompts
Elkonin boxes are a great tool for children to use. These boxes make the individual sounds children say visible. They can be paired with letters. As a child says the letter sound the move the letter into the box. It s a simple strategy that can be used for beginning readers as well as struggling readers.
Dots and arrows allow children to isolate the sounds for each letter then follow the arrow to quickly blend together the letter sounds to read the word.
