
Blending
Blending, or the ability to join speech sounds together to make words, is a crucial phonemic awareness skill that helps students to read unfamiliar words.
What is blending?
Blending is the skill of joining individual speech sounds (phonemes) together to make a word. Research suggests that blending is a crucial phonemic awareness skill that should be taught as part of a research-based approach to the teaching of reading.
Can you blend (join) these speech sounds to hear the word?
Why is blending important?
Blending is a crucial skill in learning to read since being able to mentally join speech sounds together to make words helps students to decode unfamiliar words using letter-sound patterns when reading. Difficulties with the ability to blend is a hallmark of the struggling reader.
Which Reading Doctor® apps help with developing blending skills?
Apps for teaching basic blending skills (with single letter-sounds)
The following Reading Doctor® teaching tools help you to teach students to blend CVC, CCVC and CVCC words with single letter-sound patterns (words such as 'cat, stop' and 'list'). These tools are recommended for teaching blending skills to beginning readers (aged 4-8) and older, struggling readers. For more information about how each app teaches students to use blending skills to read words, please click on the links:
Apps for teaching students to blend longer letter-sound patterns
Once students have mastered blending shorter words, the following tools can help you to teach blending skills using more complex words. For more information about how each app teaches blending skills, please click on the links: