Stuck Sounding Our Words?
Is your child stuck sounding out words? You gently encourage your child by saying, “Sound it out.” But, the task seems laborious. Your child is still sounding out every word, just like you’ve told them to like this: ‘ch-a-p’, ‘ch-a-p’. And what’s worse, your child is sounding out every single word. They’re not just saying the whole word. How do you help your child move beyond ‘ch-a-p’ to just saying the word ‘chap’? Today, we’ll tackle the phonics skill of blending, so that she’s no longer stuck on sounding out words.
When your child is stuck on sounding out words, you need to eventually move your child to progress as a reader from sounding out every single word, to just saying and reading whole words without verbally sounding them out. You’ve encouraged your child to, “Sound it out.” But instead of your child just saying the whole word after sounding it out once, he is still sounding out every sound in the word.
It’s time to boost your son’s phonics skill of blending, so that he can progress from saying ‘ch-a-p’ to just saying the word ‘chap’. This is not necessarily a reading issue, but here are 3 strategies to boost your child’s blending ability to quickly say and read whole words as a beginning reader: successive blending, onset-rime reading strategy and oral phonemic awareness practice.
Successive blending. Choose words with continuous sounds – can hold (s, m, l, n, f, r, z, v and all short vowel sounds) and stop sounds at the end (f, p, b, t). (Sat, sad, map, nut, sob, rip, fin , zip). Successive blending – blend the first two sounds together, hold that word part in their head, then add the final stop sound. Successive blending reduces the cognitive load (or thinking process) in your child’s working memory, so that she can focus on saying a whole word, not just concentrate on smaller, individual phonemes every single time.
Successive blending is a reading strategy designed to reduce cognitive load for students with weak phonological working memory by breaking down the blending process into smaller, manageable steps. Instead of trying to blend all sounds at once, students blend the first two sounds, then blend that result with the third sound, and continue this step-by-step process to build the complete word. This scaffolding technique helps students who might otherwise drop or mis-order sounds when sounding out words, supporting their ability to decode words more accurately.
Onset-rime Picture the word cat. But there is a space between the letter c, and the letters at are close together and underlined as one unit. The onset sound is /c/ and the rime, r-i-m-e, is what follows, ‘at’. Onset-rime is a reading strategy that can successfully used with CVC words for beginning readers.
Start orally blending words with phonemic awareness, then add graphemes. Phonemic awareness is your child understanding that words can be taken apart into smaller, individual sounds. Phonemic awareness skills are strengthened when graphemes are added. BUT, if your child can’t blend sound orally, then practice without graphemes which is the phonics term for symbols representing phonemes, which are the smallest units of sounds in a word.
