Practice and Learn Blending Letter Sounds to Read and Spell Words

Roleplay the Strategies!

Ask a partner to practice teaching these strategies with you! You will take the role of teacher, and your partner will take the role of student. Then you’ll switch roles with a new set of letters and words. If you don’t have a partner, play around with both roles; and be sure to practice the strategies out loud, just as you would in real life with a student. 

Partners, remember to make a few errors during the roleplay so that you can practice giving corrective feedback. We'll cover how to give corrective feedback in more detail in lesson 3.4 of the course. If you are already familiar with this approach, practice recording errors with this sample form (opens in new window). 

In this roleplay activity, you’ll practice blending sounds to read whole words. 

1. Write the following words on a piece of paper:

fun, bath, rock, best

2. Touch and Say each word aloud. 

Take for example, brush. 

Point to the beginning sound 'b'. Say it aloud. 

/b/

Point to and say each letter sound in order, running your finger under the word, left to right, at the rate of about one sound each half second. 

/b/, /r/, /u/, /sh/

Read the word three times, slowly compressing the word as you repeat it. 

Go from 

bruuuuuuushhhhhh 

to 

bruuushhhh 

to 

brush

3. Switch roles with your partner. Write out a new set of words and repeat the steps above with: 

shell, thin, check, moss 

This is a strategy we use to teach students to match sounds to letters in order to spell a word!  

1. Select a list of words for your student (partner) to spell. You may use: 

bricks, farming, paint

2. Prepare materials for your student to use: 

• a copy of the Sounds to Spelling paper grid (opens in new window)
• a set of small markers or tokens 

3. Work with your partner to practice the steps for Sounds to Spelling. (Revisit the previous course page if you need a sample script to follow.) 

Here’s a review of the process: 

Say the word.

Student repeats the word and pushes a token into the boxes for each sound. 

Teacher asks two types of questions about the sounds: 

After the student has isolated each sound with a token, you would ask, 

Show me the /_/ sound. 

Pointing to each sound token ask, 

What is this sound? 

These two questions can be repeated for different sounds in the word so that the student is responding to questions about all of the represented sounds. 

After the questions have been asked, the student pushes aside the token and writes the letter(s) (grapheme) for each sound on the box, saying the sounds as they write the letter(s). 

Then, the student writes the entire word on the line below the boxes, explained on the previous page.

4. Switch roles with your partner. Repeat the steps above with: 

white, thirsty, healing