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  • Blends Skill Explainer

Build-a-Word: Beginning Blends

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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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