Segmenting and Blending Picture Cards

Here are three simple activities with supporting picture cards to help a child to learn to blend orally.

Blending sounds orally can be a helpful pre-step to sounding out words in text, for some children who have difficulty hearing sounds in words.

Introduction:
I wrote them for an 8 yr old child whom I tutor. He has a smattering of phonic knowledge, but having not learned to blend properly is now guessing and unable to read fluently. This is a common problem, but it must not be allowed to persist or the child will not learn to read fluently or will take a very long time to do so.

If you are asking the question: "Why can't my child read accurately?" or "Why does my child guess words?" the answer is: because s/he had not learned to blend. The ability to blend is a vital foundation for all further phonic work. without it, a child will struggle to learn to read.

Objectives:

These activities will help a child to both oral segment words to separate the sounds in each word and blend them to put them back together to me a word. The words chosen for these activities are not written down, so no actual reading is required, for we are training the child to hear sounds in words, and we do not want the child to memorise the patterns of letters in words before she/he is able to understand the relationship between letters and sounds as we hear them in words.

What is included?

3 suggested activities

48 large picture cards in colour: 24 mixed sounds, 24 CVC words

48 small picture cards in colour and black and white: 24 mixed sounds, 24 CVC words

Various baseboards

Although these activities are most useful when a child is first beginning to blend CVC words, the words themselves contain other sounds that will most probably/may not yet have been taught. This is not a problem as the child will not see the word written down and will not be required to sound out any actual written words.

These activities are listening activities. This is a deliberate act to limit the amount of exposure a child has to seeing CVC words, before working on blending with him/her, further limiting the possibility that a child will memorise the words before learning to blend.

More

You can use the material to make games of your own.

Grades/ages

Although these activities can be used with young children who are just beginning to blend they are most suited to reading intervention work with older children.

1 PDF file

Instructions for 3 oral blending activities

48 large pictures in colour

48 small pictures in colour and black and white

Various game boards to use with the activities or to make your own activities