Phoneme Blending For Fluency

Phoneme blending is key for students to develop into fluent readers and not get stuck in sounding out individual phonemes.

But before we get to blending sounds into words using beginning, middle and ending sounds, let’s back up a few steps. To build stronger readers, we need activities that link phonemic awareness and phonics skills together! 

Phonemic awareness activity cards (changing phonemes in words to make new words) is a great activity for students to hear, isolate, delete or substitute phonemes in words.

Then go the next step and use those skills in word links or word chains. But now we are attaching the graphemes or writing to the activities.

Another great activity to build segmenting and blending phonemes with students is word mapping. Students love to get to practice with these type of activities!

Now that you have taught your students how to tap, map, and graph individual phonemes what is the next step?

The next step is building blending skills using beginning, middle and ending sounds

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If we don’t add in that step some of our developing readers may get stuck in the phase of individual phonemes. But before we add in blending boards using blends and digraphs, our students need that solid foundation of hearing and graphing individual phonemes.

Students need to move from individual phoneme blending /b/ /l/ /a/ /k/ to beginning, middle and ending sounds /bl/ /a/ /ck/. They can even move on to onset and rime /bl/ /ack/ to whole word reading. It is a process and a progression of skills built up on a solid foundation of both phonological awareness and phonics skills carefully and explicitly taught to our students.

TIP: A great way to make these activities multi sensory is to add velcro! Students can run their finger over the velcro strips (and touch the dots) as they blend the sounds together! Teach students that as they run their finger across to continue the blending the sounds to say the word.

Blending beginning, middle and ending sounds in together in words will build automaticity and fluency for our students in both reading and writing.