AlphBlending and Materials and Activites together

BLENDING SOUNDS INTO WORDS

Even for students who have mastered their sound / symbol relationships, blending
sounds into words can be excruciatingly difficult. The borders between phonemes in a
word are artificial. If you look at one of those devices that represents speech with a
moving stylus, there are no breaks between phonemes in a word, and sometimes no
breaks even between words. We talk in a continuous stream of sound. You can help by
lots of modeling. “/m/ /a/ /p/, map. /s/ /a/ /t/, sat. Now, what am I saying? /f/ /a/ /n/?”

When you begin asking students to blend sounds into words (in other words, to decode),
make worksheets with large font with a dot under each letter that makes a sound. Use a
san serif font like Calibri or Comic Sans. And number everything, for easy reference:

1. m a p map

2. f a n fan

3. s a d sad

4. r a g rag

Have the students turn their pencils upside down and touch the dot under the letter with
their erasers as they say the sounds segmented, and then move to the word on the right
and say it naturally as they sweep their eraser underneath left to right. This is focusing
and multisensory, and is an alternative to Wilson tapping, which is challenging for some
of our students.

If you look back at the 0-1.9 progress sheet, the first consonant sounds taught are f, h, l,
m, n, r, s, v and z. Try making those sounds. What do they all have in common?

Right, they can all be sustained. You can keep saying the sound for the letter F until the
cows come home (or at least until your breath runs out), as opposed to one of the stops
on your consonant chart from the phonology section, like /p/ or /t/. It is a good idea,
then, when you first are teaching blending, to use words that begin with these sustained

consonant sounds, so you can “sing” them right into the short vowel sound that follows.

MATERIALS AND ACTIVITIES

Once students are comfortable blending (no small feat), you can proceed through the
sequence of alphabetics skills, beginning wherever initial diagnostic testing has shown
your students need to begin. This will be tricky, since they won't all be at the same
point, so you will have to aim in the middle.

You will need a lot of materials for each step, as no published phonics program, even the
Wilson Reading System, has enough activities to last as long as the students need to
securely learn a pattern. This involves a lot of over-teaching, over-learning, much
practice. Make a habit of developing a separate labeled folder for each skill on the
progress sheet, and keep in it photocopies of any worksheets from different published
materials, or that you have made, the original in a clear sheet protector, along with packs
of 3”x5” cards and games. You may need a walk-in closet instead of a file drawer.
Alphabetics teachers have to be assertive about the amount of space they need!

We can't cover all the skills, so let's take 2-letter initial consonant blends as an example.
This means students have learned the sounds of the individual consonants and short
vowels, and can read cvc words. Since the first step in an alphabetics lesson is a review
of previous skills, the sounds of the short vowels and any problem consonants would be
quickly reviewed. Then, as a phonemic awareness introduction, you would say “Tell me
if you hear one sound, or two? /t/ (students say 'one'), /s/ /t/ (students say 'two')” and so
on, followed by asking them to write the letter or letters they hear.

Good materials to start with are magnetic sound cards on the board, large enough for
everyone to see. The Wilson sound cards are good here, or you can make your own with
5”x7” cards and magnetic tape from the hardware store. Place them all on the board in
this order:

abcdef
ghijkl
mnopqrs
tuvwxyz

The reason is that when you get to the ff, ll, ss, zz spelling rule, it's easy to show it.

Now you can pull cards down and easily manipulate them, or have students come up and
do the same. This is good multisensory practice for anyone, but especially LD students.

You can pull down the letters to make nap, then pull down an s to make snap, or
swap the a for an i and make snip. The Wilson Reading System offers “magnetic

journals,” which are simply flip-open folders with accompanying magnetic foam letters
like the blackboard ones, for seat work with individual students.

You can next make worksheets with dots under each sound for blending, with care to
show one sound for consonant digraphs, and two sounds for consonant blends:

1. f l a p flap
2. d r u m drum
3. s t i tch stitch
4. b l o ck block

Then you can move to worksheets in published materials that ask the student to match a
word with a picture. Here there is an extra challenge if English is the student's second
language, as you may have to teach the meaning of a word like “stitch.”

Another kind of worksheet would involve cloze exercises where each sentence has a
blank and the student must choose from words at the top.

If you make 3”x5” cards with 2-letter consonant blends, you can use them in many
ways. You can flash them one at a time at the group and see who can read a word. You
can deal them out and have students choose a word to show and read. Or you can deal
them out, ask each student to spread his/her words on the table, and you can ask “Who
has the word that means ___?” (e.g. “something you beat on to make a rhythm”)
Thinking back to “Steps in An Alphabetics Lesson,” after individual words comes

reading phrases and sentences. Phrases might include high-frequency unphonetic sight
words that the students have been learning by tracing and chanting in another part of the
class, words like “the” and “this” and “good” and “have.” A worksheet might include
phrases like the following, again numbered for easy reference:

1. a good plan
2. this stick
3. still mad
4. fish and crab
5. the bad smell
6. grab a block
7. have a drum

And then you would proceed to sentences:

1. I have a plan.
2. This is a good club.
3. I will slam it shut.

You will remember from your study of Reading Components the importance of Fluency.
Even though this course does not encompass the teaching of fluency, when a student
reads the above phrases and sentences, s/he should read each once for accuracy, and a
second time for fluency, trying to read smoothly with expression. The teacher can do
lots of modeling here.

Even with material this limited, it is not too early to focus on meaning. After the student
reads “I have a plan,” the teacher can ask “What kind of plan?” After the student has
read “I will slam it shut,” the teacher can ask “What do you think you are slamming
shut? How are you feeling if you slam something shut?” Even in a lesson much earlier
in the sequence, when the student only knows short a and short i and is reading a
sentence like “Dan has a bad hip,” you can ask “Why do you think he has a bad hip?” It
is crucial that from the very beginning students understand that print carries meaning,
and that we not delay the teaching of comprehension skills like making inferences.

Thinking back again to the steps in an alphabetics lesson, next comes the reading of
controlled text. Here the student encounters a story that as much as possible only
contains words s/he has studied. These can be found in the Wilson Student Readers, in
my basal readers Sam and Val (0-1.9 GE) and Main Street (2-3.9 GE), all of which are
appropriate for adult readers, and in many other published phonics programs, though one
has to pick and choose in order to avoid childish-sounding content. If you write such
stories yourselves, be sure to save and share them!

These stories may seem stilted, but are often the first connected text our students have
successfully read, and can be a source of pride and delight.