Does teaching blending phonemes matter?
About two years ago I worked with a fantastic kindergarten teacher. She was truly epic.
But, this one day we were in an MTSS meeting together and she burst out crying. She had been working her butt off trying to teach her students to read CVC words. For months she had been working with these kids, and nothing was working.
Her students knew their letters and sounds, but when it came to blending sounds to create words, it wasn’t working.
Despite all of her work in phonics, these students just were not getting over that reading hump. All the suggestions that the team presented had been tried. So what could be the problem?
The problem was poor phonemic awareness skills…specifically blending phonemes.
Blending Phonemes sounds like such a baby skill!
Phonemic awareness, as a whole, is sometimes viewed as”baby” skills, but they are the foundation to all other reading skills. Without those foundational skills, everything else is very wobbly.
Before I get into the specifics about why blending phonemes is important, I should define what a phoneme is. Phonemes are the individual sounds in a word. For example, when we say my name (Jessica) there are 6 sounds in my name= /j/-/e/-/s/-/i/-/c/-/a/ even though there are 7 letters. All words are made up of various numbers of phonemes all mixed together.
Yes, blending phonemes sounds super easy. But many students come in to school (kindergarten or first grade usually) who do not have experience with these skills. Also, all students need these skills as a solid foundation to future reading skills. Some of these students need direct instruction in these skills in order to really own them. They just aren’t going to pick up phonemic awareness skills without help.
Is teaching this skill really going to help my kids?
YUP! No doubt, if your students are struggling with blending phonemes, teaching blending phonemes is going to make a big difference!
Blending phonemes links directly with being able to blend the sounds in words when reading.
Some students take a longer time processing the visual letter into it’s sounds. Teaching this skill helps them to move this processing a little bit faster
This skill also builds into later, more advanced skills such as adding prefixes and suffixes to words.
Ok, I get it, I need to teach blending phonemes….what do I do?
- 1 easy way to teach blending sounds is to use the joints in your arm. Say the sounds of a word individually and model saying the sounds more quickly and starting to blend the sounds together. (bounce hand versus smooth swipe to demonstrate the sounds)
- Another easy way is to have the students say the sounds more and more quickly, or more slowly to practice putting more or less space between phonemes.
- For students weak in this skill, practice it daily for 3-4 minutes.
- Make skill practice fun. Make a game out of it.
- Use down time and transitions to practice this skill throughout the day. The more students practice it, the quicker they will master it 🙂
How do I progress monitor blending phonemes???
- Make charts to track how many words students can blend.
- Focus on a certain number of sounds in words to track, build as students get better
- Check out my Blending Phonemes Progress Monitoring product to make it easier for you. Cards and tracking are all ready for you to make life easier 🙂
- If you’re interested in all the Phonemic Awareness Progress Monitoring, I’ve also added a Growing Bundle, which I will be adding to over the next several weeks. It will include progress monitoring materials for all 4 phonemic awareness skill areas and all the pieces needed to track that data.
- Check out my blog post and podcast on Segmenting Sounds to learn more about how this skill supports higher level skills and get some good ideas to teach segmenting phonemes quickly and easily!