Segmenting and blending sounds
The phonemic awareness skills of segmenting and blending are the most critical because they are pre-skills for reading words. It is important to note that phonemic awareness training has the strongest effect on word reading skills when combined with teaching children about the letters, or graphemes, which represent phonemes.
Segmenting is where the child can confidently break a spoken word into its constituent sounds or phonemes e.g. when given the spoken word ‘wed’ the child can correctly break it apart as w-e-d. When given the word ‘cough’, they can break it apart as k-o-f.
Conversely, blending is where the child is given a series of spoken sounds or phonemes and can correctly put them together, e.g. “Can you tell me what this word says, s-a-t?” and child correctly says, “sat”. When given the sounds b-r-oo-m they successfully blend the sounds together to say, “broom”.
Teacher models segmenting throughout the daily routine
-Moats 2015
-Marcia K Henry, 2010
-Kilpatrick
Teacher demonstrates oral segmenting and blending sounds to beginning learners
See it, say it, move it activity
Whole class instruction: segmenting & blending with corresponding graphemes.