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Blends Skill Explainer

Build-a-Word: Beginning Blends

Video thumbnail for Build-a-Word: Beginning Blends — Produced by Reading Universe, a partnership of WETA, Barksdale Reading Institute, and First Book

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Antonio Fierro: Let's use the build-a-word strategy with blends. The word is sled. I rode my sled down the hill. Sled. What's the word? Sled. Let's see how many sounds, how many phonemes are in the word sled ... /s/, /l/, /ĕ/, /d/. Four. So we need four lines ... /s/, /l/, /ĕ/, /d/. The first phoneme, or sound, is /s/. What's the grapheme ... 's'. The second phoneme, or sound ... /l/. Grapheme ... 'l'. /ĕ/, grapheme ... 'e', right? And the final phoneme, or sound, in the word sled is /d/, which graphene ... the 'd', right? Let's write that ... 's', 'l', 'e', 'd' ... sled.

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Support Materials

Word Chaining with Beginning Blends

The purpose of this activity is to offer students practice reading words with beginning blends, like snap and twig.

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Reading Universe is made possible by generous support from Jim & Donna Barksdale; the Hastings/Quillin Fund, an advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (opens in new window); the AFT (opens in new window); the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation (opens in new window); and several anonymous donors.

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