3.1 Prepare for Phoneme Segmentation and Blending Instruction

Before you teach, you'll need to do a few things to get ready:

• Select the words you'll work with.
• Gather any materials for instruction, like manipulatives or picture cards.
• Select a segmenting and blending strategy for the skill you're teaching (We offer several in the videos and lesson plans below.).

Choose words your students are familiar with — and move in a progression that starts with the easiest sounds to hear and push together: 

1. First, teach how to blend words that have two phonemes and begin with vowels (which are all continuous, stretchable sounds), like in, am, us, and ice. This makes blending easier because the sounds move into one another.
2. Then teach how to blend words that have two phonemes, begin with vowels, and end with stop sounds (consonant sounds that cannot be elongated), like at, it, and up. This is a little more difficult and may need some instruction on not adding the “uh” sound at the end of the stop sounds.
3. Next, teach how to blend words that have three phonemes and begin with continuous consonant sounds, like sun, moon, and shop. 
4. Then, introduce words beginning with stop sounds, like top, give, and check. This opens up a large amount of words for students to blend.
5. After that, you can introduce words with four or five phonemes, like stack, flat, and blast.

As you preselect words for your lessons, use our helpful list.

Remember, you won't use any letters when teaching this skill, only sounds. But you can bring in manipulatives such as felt squares, tokens, Elkonin boxes, or slinkies. A manipulative can serve as a visual representation of an individual phoneme, and that can be especially helpful for children who struggle to keep the phonemes in their working memory.

Once children are able to accurately segment and blend, you'll want to stop using manipulatives.

Here's another important layer of this work: we should integrate the meaning of a word as children are segmenting and blending its phonemes. Picture cards that illustrate word meanings can help children clearly understand that phonemes make up words and that those words have meaning. 

We hope you'll use our Reading Universe picture cards, which you can download below. The large format picture cards are perfect for whole-class and small-group lessons, and the small format cards incorporated into the Reading Universe student practice activities in this skill explainer.

There are several engaging strategies for teaching phoneme identification. All of the strategies in the four videos listed below provide students with a concrete representation of each phoneme without using letters.

Download this printable PDF that includes eight ways to teach phonological awareness skills, including Tap and Say, Roller Coaster, and Stretch and Shrink.