Blending.

Blending seems easy to an adult reader. However, it is a skill that can be difficult for some children to learn. It also depends on phonemic awareness, the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in words. This is not an innate skill, either. Brain studies have shown that adult illiterates do not have phonemic awareness until they are taught this skill as part of learning to read, showing brain changes after they learn these skills. (1)

Phonemic Awareness may take more work to be developed in some children. A simple, easy to use book for a young student with just a bit of a phonemic awareness problem is "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children" by Marilyn Adams. Students with more difficulties may need a program designed for students with dyslexia.

Recent brain research has found that good readers process all the letters in words, just very fast in parallel. (2) More explanations about this and how and why sight words should not be taught by wholes, but instead should be taught phonetically, can be found on 40L’s sight word page. It is important to start good habits from the beginning, focusing on sounding out every letter in every word from left to right.

Step 1. Oral Blending

You should start with oral blending, pick some simple 2 letter words to start with, like on, up, me, no, go. Letter sounds are typically shown with slashes, so you would say: /o/ /n/ makes on. Start slow, then speed up. Make it a fun game, do a word here and there as you go, /g/ /o/, go!

Step 2. Letter Sounds

The easiest way to learn the basic letter sounds is with the Leapfrog video Talking Letter Factory, but you can also use other methods. It is 5 stars for a reason, that little frog is a master letter sound teacher, and he never tires of the repetition necessary to master the sounds. 40L’s vowel and consonant charts and cards can be used while learning to blend and read words and are also helpful for learning letter sounds.

Step 3. Blending

Now, we can combine the knowledge from the first two stops to blend letters in written words. Again, start with 2 letter words, and, use the easiest letters to blend to start. The letters M, N, all vowels, and R and L at beginning of word are the easiest letters to blend. (After a vowel, the letters L and R will modify the sound of the vowel.)

Explain blending by starting with the sounds stretched out, then “said faster.” A visual picture of this can be shown with a slinky or rubber bands contracting and sounds getting shorter and “mushed together.”

40L has a YouTube video about blending to help.

Fun Blending Ideas

A fun way to learn to blend is to run a small toy race car or a small plastic animal over letters, blending each sound and then saying the word as the car or animal crosses each sound. You can use letters written on index cards or letter game tiles or magnetic letters, you can also use 40L’s letter cards, these cards spelling out the word "mad" are shown below.

Blending may take time to learn

Blending is a developmental skill that may take some time and explanation and modeling to click, if the skill is not clicking, go back to oral blending and work on spelling. Many children are able to spell simple short words before they are able to master the skill of blending. Spelling will help reinforce the left to right direction of reading and spelling. You can teach that “letter sounds are used to read a word, letter names to spell a word.” Syllables and 2 letter words are also easier to learn to blend than 3 letter words, you can work on the syllables in Webster’s Speller.

Because letter sounds are actually letter sound approximations, or allophones, blending is harder to learn than spelling and is a developmental skill that takes both practice and understanding of how these approximations blend together to make a word. You can see more about letter sound approximations and pictures of sound waves on 40L’s dyslexia page.

Some children pick up phonemic awareness and blending apparently out of the blue, but it is a skill that is not innate, some children can learn it from clues picked up from the phonetic nature of language and their observations of the language in their environment. Most children can learn to blend by age 5, and some children can learn to blend at age 3 or 4, but it may take a lot of practice and modeling and explanation even for a 5 or 6 year old.

Allophones and Approximations

Letter sounds said in isolation are not exact representations of how the sound when they are put together in words. In fact, there is a name for the different variations of how letter sounds are made, linguists call these different sounds “allophones.” The letter "t" will sound slightly different in the words "top" vs "stop" vs "at." The different sounds it makes are called allophones. 

Moreover, letter sounds in isolation are actually approximations, they will not exactly match their sound when put together in words. For example, you cannot say the sound of the letter b, /b/ in isolation. Even if you think you are, you cannot physically say it without a bit of a vowel sound, typically short u “uh” at the end of the letter. You may say the “uh” part very short in duration, but it is there even if you do not hear or feel yourself saying the “uh” sound at the end of /b/. So, when you blend b with a vowel, it is an approximate sound of b that is being blended and the vowel portion of b will be cut off and instead you will say the vowel that comes after the b. 

The picture of the blocks below are a visual representation of what is happening when you say this, the bumps on the block representing the vowel portion when you try to say a pure /b/ in isolation but say a bit of vowel at the end. When you put the sounds together in a word, the vowel part is removed just like the block's bumps are hidden when they are put together.

The letters m and n can be extended without adding a vowel sound, but they are typically said for a longer length when said in isolation than when put together to make a word, the picture below shows what happens when /m/ and /e/ are blended together to make the word “me”.

Phonics methods that make learning blending easier

The “I See Sam” method focuses on left to right blending. A study of this method found that it reduced illiteracy. (3)  The I See Sam books are available to print or online with instructions.

Other beginning phonics methods that focus on blending words are the free to print Blend Phonics from Don Potter and the inexpensive book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  Many parents find that towards the end of the book, it is not quite as easy. You can supplement with fun phonics games.

The free to print Word Mastery starts with the sounds found to be best for teaching continuous blending. A recent study found continuous blending, without stops between sounds, was found to be best for teaching blending, “connected phonation more effective than segmented phonation.” (4) 

Make blending fun and you will get there, soon you will be blending words with ease. You can work on spelling and handwriting while trying different blending ideas. Each practice session is a step closer to fluent, fun blending and reading.