One day, I discovered how important oral blending is. I’ll never forget a little guy in my first-grade intervention group. Let’s call him Jace. Jace could tell you every letter sound on the blending board. Fast. Point to the s and he’d say /s/ before you finished pointing. So we’d
Let me paint a picture for you…… You ask a student to find the letter M. They pause, look slightly upward, and quietly mouth: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m. They find it. They move on. You move on. But something important just
You give the alphabet assessment. The student scores 90% or better. On paper, they know their letters. Then you think back to what actually happened during the test. The hesitations. The eyes drifting up and to the right while they search for the letter, the sound, the name. And you
It’s the fourth week of school, and you’re still wondering when to start teaching blending. Not because you don’t want to start, but because half your class can’t reliably name all 26 letters yet, and somewhere along the way you picked up the idea that decoding waits until the alphabet
Why can’t my students blend sounds into words? This was a question that I asked myself very often. You see, I had a student stuck in what I call the Blending Black Hole. Every. Single. Word. Took. An. Eternity. C… a… t… She’d look at me, eyes pleading, “Can I
If you’ve ever listened to a student carefully say each sound in a word, only to guess the word anyway, you already know the following information……decoding isn’t about exposure. It’s about structure. Short vowel word chains are one of the best ways to help students move from knowing sounds to
Blending is one of the most important early reading skills—and one that many young learners struggle to master. In this post, you’ll discover
research-backed strategies for teaching blending with confidence. Whether you’re a classroom teacher, interventionist, or parent, these tips will help your students move from choppy, sound-by-sound reading to fluent, confident decoding.
Learning to read is a puzzle with many pieces. When it comes to the science of reading, Scarborough’s Reading Rope acts as a map, helping us navigate through the different aspects of reading and how they connect. Scarborough’s model helps teachers understand how reading development occurs when decoding words or
The journey to becoming a confident reader starts well before children can sound out their first word. Print awareness, the foundation of literacy development, lays the groundwork for a lifetime of exploration through written language. The stronger a child’s grasp of concepts of print, the smoother their transition into reading
I graduated from college and prepared myself to storm the gates of the teaching world. Once the door to my classroom closed behind me, I faced a classroom filled with diverse learners, each with unique learning needs. I had a few struggling readers, and that number has grown exponentially over
Learn how to create positive literacy experiences right from the start!
