Oral Blending Activity

Here are three simple activities to help a child to learn to blend.

These activities are listening activities. This is a deliberate act to limit the amount of exposure a child has to seeing CVC words, before working on blending with him/her, and so further limiting the possibility that a child will memorise the words before having learned to blend.

By all means use ‘robot’ talk as you do these activities with your child.

Before doing these activities with your child:

• Do ensure that a child can give the correctly pronounced sounds on sight of the letters of the alphabet.
• Remove any distractions/background noise.
• Have the child’s full attention.

Full instructions and black-and-white pictures are provided.

I wrote them for an 8-year-old child whom I tutor. He has a smattering of phonic knowledge, but having not learned to blend properly is now guessing and unable to read fluently. This is a common problem, but it must not be allowed to persist or the child will not learn to read fluently or will take a very long time to do so.