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How to teach blending sounds

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This post about blending sounds contains affiliate links.

I’m currently teaching my younger daughter to read. She knows all her letters, most of her sounds, and has all the pre-reading skills I recommend before teaching a child to read.

But we’ve been hitting a little bit of a wall with blending sounds.

She’ll see a word like this: wag, and she’ll say the sounds /w/ /a/ /g/ … “Pat?”

Woah … where did pat come from?

Actually, this isn’t all that uncommon. It can be hard for kids to keep all those sounds in their short term memory long enough to put them together to make the right word.

That’s where successive blending comes in.

Here’s a video that shows exactly how it works.


If you prefer a picture tutorial, here you go:

I created a set of cards – one set for the first sound, one for the middle sound, and one for the ending sound. The first cards are all letters that are used in CVC words. The middle letters are all vowels. The final letters are all letters we often see at the end of CVC words (so, for example, you won’t find an h or a j in the last stack of cards).

To play, simply flip over the first card and say its sound. Have your learner repeat it after you. /h/

Flip over the second sound. Have your learner repeat it. /a/

THEN (and this is key), push those first two sounds together. Say their combined sound. /haaa/ Have your learner repeat it.

Flip over the final card. Say its sound. /t/ Have your learner repeat it.

Now put all the sounds together. First … /ha/ /t/. Then, /haaat/. Have your learner repeat it.

For my daughter, the favorite part of this activity was determining whether the words were real or silly.

If you have learners struggling to blend sounds, or you’re simply introducing this skill, I strongly recommend successive blending! I learned about it from the wonderful book, Making Sense of Phonics (check it out if you’d like to learn more about teaching phonics!).

Looking for more phonics resources?

I recommend my giant bundle of printable books and games!

© 2018, Anna G. All rights reserved.

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Comments

    • I know what you mean! It’s easy to jump to conclusions when children have this issue, but often it’s just something they need to get the hang of.

      Reply

  6. This is perfect timing for me! Exactly what I need to help a little boy I teach who has difficulty blending. I can’t wait to try this out with him! Thank you!

    Reply

  7. I will try this with my son, he is 5 and we have difficulties to get him to read.
    Thanks!
    Hugs from Honduras

    Reply

  8. Exactly how the kids do it. “S-a-t” map…… I will give it a try. It’s been quite difficult to get the kids I teach to read CVC words.

    Reply

  11. Hi ! Thanks for sharing this amazing resource but I had a question . Do you teach them to combine the first two sounds in the word or the last two like for cat would it be /ca/ and then/ t /or /c /and then /at/. Look forward to your response

    Reply

    • I would do the first two sounds and then the final sound. But the other way you’re mentioning is also a great way to teach beginning readers; it’s teaching with word families. You’ll find many, many resources on my site that you can use with that approach. I just want to be clear that with this approach, you work with the first two sounds first.

      Reply

  12. Thank you so much Anna!
    My students are gonna love this and I must say that your daughter is doing pretty well.!👍😍

    Reply

  13. We do something a little bit different. We start by doing each sound individually, then move to doing the first sound by itself and then the last two together (onset and rime), and finally all three together. This also helps with learning word families and rhyming. Like your daughter, my students absolutely love determining if it’s a real or nonsense word!…. Thanks much for the blending cards!

    Reply

    • Yes! This is actually the way I usually teach sounding out words, which is why I have so many word family activities on my site. I didn’t need successive blending with my older kids, but I’m finding that it’s what my current new reader needs.

      Reply

  14. Yes, successive blending is great for those children who struggle with blending! I tried it last year with a student who was struggling and it really helped her. I found out about it through your Teaching Every Reader course – thank you so much!

    Reply

  15. This is exactly how I teach my special education students (1st and 2nd grade), but we use a blending board.

    This strategy works great to help my students blend sounds together to read real and make-believe words. It is almost always the last sound that trips them up and will make them say something different. But having them sound out the first two sounds, and blend just those two sounds together first really helps. Then they can say the last sound and repeat (sometime resound out the first two sounds) and then blend the last sound with the first two has always helped my students become readers.

    Reply

    • Thank you so much for your feedback, Kristina! I had looked online to see if we could purchase a blending board, but I just saw DIY blending boards. Did you purchase yours?

      Reply

  16. This is so great! I’m working in CVC with my students right now. Thanks for the new strategy. I think the putting together of the first 2 sounds will be a good strategy for some of my kiddos who struggle to keep the sounds.

    Reply

  18. I love this, the only thing that I would comment on is the sound for ‘w’. This sound is easier for poor spellers if said using the pure sound as in ‘windmill’ almost like woo, but a shorter sound than oo. ‘Wuh’ is to sounds, w and the schwa uh. Using this sound a word like wig would be read wuhig. For dyslexic spellers this can be really challenging. Often when testing poor spellers in higher grades they still struggle to spell, as these schwas get in the way; huh, juh, muh, puh etc. Lots are now being taught with pure sounds, but as teachers we can cause real problems for some spellers if we introduce these sounds with the added ‘uh’.
    I love all the posts, but I thought this might help those with students that really struggle.

    Reply

  19. Thank you so much for your idea about teaching successive blending. I printed it off straight away and used it with my little groups today. I love it and the simplicity of it. Appreciate your efforts in keeping the lessons so interesting.
    Averil

    Reply

  20. Thanks Ana, these are wonderful. Thanks for the amazing video tutorial, my 4 year old saw it and she is all excited about it. I am gonna try it.

    Reply

  25. Thank you for this great resource! Would love to see another set with some final blends, such as in “camp” and “test”, to take this idea to the next level.

    Reply

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