B-l-e-n-d-i-n-g Tricks in Phonics to Improve Reading

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Reading is one of the most essential skills to develop in children during their formative years. During this period, both parents and teachers play an important role in helping kids learn to read and write.

It is natural for children to struggle with reading until they develop phonological awareness. A little bit of phonemic awareness, alphabet recognition, and blending can help them achieve reading fluency.

So, what is phonemic awareness? It is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in spoken words. These sounds are called phonemes, a total of 44 in the English language. But don’t confuse these sounds with letters; there are only 26 letters (A to Z). Alphabet recognition involves learning these 26 letters by name, shape, and sound.

Phoneme or oral blending is one of the most effective methods to develop effective reading skills. Let’s try to understand what is blending!

What is Oral Blending?

Oral blending is the process of combining phonemes (individual sounds) to make complete words.

For example, d-o-g = dog, c-a-t = cat.


When you give a word sound by sound to children, it allows them to focus on hearing each sound and helps them combine the phonemes together to form the word “dog” or "cat.”


To make the identification of sounds being blended easier for kids, you can try to repeat the "individual sounds” twice or thrice:


For example, d-o-g, d-o-g, d-o-g = dog.


This method of oral blending builds the foundation for identifying sounds, blending (or breaking), and accurately reading written words. It focuses only on sound manipulation, without the added complexity of letter recognition, helping kids decode unfamiliar words.


Alongside, “segmenting” can also be taught to children. This method involves breaking a word into phonemes.


For example: elephant = e-l-e-ph-a-n-t.


Segmentation is useful in decoding when a student looks at a word, breaks it down letter by letter, and uses each letter’s corresponding sound to blend and ultimately read the word. You could say that segmenting and blending happen simultaneously.


3 Fun Blending Games to Boost Learning


Here are three blending phonics tricks for reading effectively:


  • Phonics Dice: Take a pair of plain wooden blocks and write a letter on each side or get an alphabet dice. Let your child roll the blocks, then say the letter sound on each block and come up with a word for each letter.
  • Change the Word: Change one letter at a time to form a new word. This game might sometimes end up back at the word you started with. For example: c-a-t, c-a-p, t-a-p, t-i-p, d-i-p, p-i-p, p-i-t, p-a-t, c-a-t! This game is perfect for practicing both blending and segmenting.
  • Yes or No Cards: Ask creatively silly questions to kids, like, "Are cows blue?" “Can elephants fly? Let children read the questions aloud and then decide whether to hold up their ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ card. Make sure they blend the sentence for the class and explain why they gave their answer.

Little Genius offers phonics-based English coaching to children between 3-14 years. To explore our programs,

please visit our website https://littlegeniusacademy.co.in/.

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