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This Reading Mama

Working on Blends

By thisreadingmama Leave a Comment

One day in the van, ALuv asked, “Mommy, do skunk and skateboard rhyme?”  Wondering where he was going with this (because he’s known how to rhyme for a couple of years now), I questioned, “What do you mean?”

“Listen, mommy.  /sk/ /sk/ skunk and /sk/ /sk/ skateboard.”

I realized he was hearing the s-k blend at the beginning of both words!  I explained that the words didn’t rhyme, but they both began with the /sk/ sound and those two letters together made a blend.  This is when I knew that ALuv was ready to explore blends.

What is a blend?  I describe it to kids as:

  • Two letters (hold up both hands separate from each other)
  • put together (bring your hands together)
  • and you hear both sounds (put your hands behind your ears)

Words Their Way treats blends in a similar manner as digraphs-with pictures at first.  This helps to work on the child’s phonemic awareness as it’s a big step to begin hearing the two separate sounds in a blend.  ALuv had five weeks of picture sorts, but we integrated short vowel work about once or twice a week.  I know I’m working backwards here, but I wanted to wait until we had all the blend sorts done before I posted.

I didn’t do all of the blend picture sorts from the book, but here are the ones we did (keep in mind that my sorts are from the 1st edition):

WEEK 1:

Sort 18- s, t, & st

WEEK 2:

Sort 21- p, l, & pl

Short Vowels were integrated through some worksheets like this one

WEEK 3:

Sort 22-pl, sl, & bl

Making Words with “blast” (a good review of bl & st blends!)

short vowel file folder games from this book

WEEK 4:

Sort 19- sp, sk & sm

He also did a few Frank Shaffer sheets like this one; which uses pictures so he had to rely solely on his ear (I’ve had these in my files so long, I have NO CLUE where they came from).

FREE Short Vowel/Sight Word Sorts, which I posted about here.  These do contain some blends.

WEEK 5:

Sort 23- cr, cl, fl, & fr

Short vowel Mix & Match Worksheet.  The book I got this sheet from is not free, BUT Florida’s Center for Reading Research has a FREE PRINTABLE called Vowel Stars that is VERY similar to this activity.  (See pgs. 1-6 of this PDF file.)  This file is FILLED with awesome activities for short vowel work.  I am going to post about a couple more of them soon!

BLEND ASSESSMENT TIME!

At the end of our study of blends, I assessed him to see what he did or didn’t understand.

Here’s how the assessment worked:

  1. I pulled 10 picture cards from the back of WTW that had 4 phonemes with blends.  The picture cards I chose were- stem, plug, trap, drip, sled, clap, crib, stop, swim & plum.
  2. I also pulled all the letters needed from my lowercase bottle cap letters.  (I made a template with four circles on which to place the bottle caps: bottle cap circles)
  3. I numbered his paper 1-10.
  4. He picked a card, said the word out loud, built the word on the four circles, then wrote the word.

He did well and only misspelled one word: STIM for stem.  (Who can blame him, though?  Where we live that’s how people say the word!)  But he still got all the blends!  Yay!  Time to move on. 🙂

Happy blending!

~Becky

 

 

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Filed Under: Learn to Read, Phonics and Word Study

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Hi! I’m Becky, a homeschooling mama with 4 blessings who keep me on my toes {and knees}. Before homeschooling, I was a classroom teacher (M.Ed.) and reading tutor. Read more about me here.

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