3.1 Prepare for Instruction on Blends

Your instruction here should go from simple to complex.

• Start by teaching beginning blends, like 'st' in step, because they are easier for students to hear and segment than ending blends, like 'lk' in milk. You can choose any beginning blend combination to start with, but we recommend teaching tricky 'r' blends like 'dr' and 'tr' separately, as they are also harder for students to hear. Once you have introduced beginning blends, you can move on to words with ending blends. 
• Begin with one-syllable words with short vowel sounds (closed syllables), like snap and shelf, before moving on to multisyllable words, like problem and dentist.
• If working with older students, depending on their ability, you can have students read and spell words with long vowel sounds and other spelling patterns that they have been explicitly taught, like twilight and stable. 

The Reading Universe lesson plans integrate specific teaching strategies for teaching children to spell and read words with blends, such as tapping sounds, using Elkonin sound boxes, and spelling with build-a-word activities. We use a combination of these strategies as we have students practice sounds, words in isolation, phrases, and sentences. 

Using Elkonin sound boxes (opens in new window) is a great way to ensure that your students hear all of the sounds in words with consonant blends. Elkonin boxes build phonological awareness by helping students segment words into individual sounds. Incorporating letters into this activity can strengthen the phoneme-grapheme connection improving both reading and spelling skills.

The build-a-word strategy can also help students identify the sounds in a word and connect them to letters for spelling. Watch Dr. Antonio Fierro demonstrate how to use it to spell words with beginning and ending blends. You can do this in the dictation portion of the lesson.

Here are some materials you might need for your lessons:

To begin, here are lists of words, phrases, and sentences with beginning and ending blends that you can use during your lesson planning.

Use these letter flash cards during your warm-up to have students practice any letter sounds they're still mastering. You can also use the flash cards without pictures to build words during your lesson.

Our resource hub has word lists, read sheets, and decodables you can use to give students more practice reading with blends.