Blending Sounds For Reading

[Guest]

Hi wonder if any of you may be able to help me. I have a 5 year old girl in my reception class who knows all the letter sounds but cannot read cvc words. I encourage her to blend quickly which she does e.g. c-a-t, so she is practically saying 'cat' but then says something like 'tip'. We have been focussing on this for a good few weeks and many of the children who didn't know as many sounds as her are now able to blend and read cvc words. The same goes for writing where she even struggles with the initial sound with many words. I am really confused and don't know how to move her forward. Her mum has also mentioned this and I played it down as obviously it's early days - just encouraging a little practice in breaking up the sounds in words and blending them to read but really feel I could do with some advice!

 

Emma x

[Susan]

Hi Emma, she is presumably not using the knowledge that she has. So with practise this should improve but without knowing the child I would be thinking about auditory discrimination skills.

 

Also can you give her pictures and letters to make the words as she may need to approach this from a different angle? So, in your example, a picture of a cat and the three letters that she can physically manipulate to make the word. You could also extend this by giving her a selection of letters from which to choose.

 

Does that help?

[Guest]

Hi there,

Just an idea, you could do onset and rime play what could go in the b-in

t-in p-in

hen with a p-en writing a number t-en

have ending sounds on display and draw initial letter towards the others or show child how to.

you could also give beginning 2 sounds and explore putting a letter on the end

e.g give pa and say its lost its last sound what could it be? Let her try different letters and try them out pa-g.-doesn't matter if its incorrect as its the skill you are trying to teach. You can also do this with a puppet-missay last sound and the puppet needs teaching to listen for the last sound.

I would also agree with Susan as a possibility -can she sequence 3 sounds?

Hope these ideas can trigger you off.

Lynda

[Guest]

I find some children focus on the final sound when a cvc word is sounded out. So when you say c a t they hang onto the t and often say a word begining with t. Have you tried building the word eg c then ca then cat. This has been successful for me.

[Guest]

Thank you very much for your responses - there are some really good ideas there and some approaches I haven't actually tried. Susan I will definitely try using physical letters for her to try and form the word with a picture and the onset and rhyme play is something I could do more of.

 

Thanks - will let you know how I get on!

 

Emma