Blending Activities in Kindergarten

Learning to read and write starts with learning to blend sounds.

Blending phonemes is an early literacy practice where children connect the sounds of the letters to make words. Cat sounds like "c-c-c-c-c a-a-a-a-a- t-t-t-t-t-t." Blending activities help kindergarten children learn how sounds make words as they begin to read and understand the written language.

Guessing Game

Tell the students that you are going to say the sound of a word and challenge them to guess the word before you finish. Pronounce each sound in the word clearly and repeat several times before going to the next sound in the word. The first child to guess the word correctly gets to choose a new word to continue the game, or you can choose to go around the table to give every child an opportunity.

Reading Choices

Choose children's literature that uses repeated speech sounds to help familiarize children to these sounds. Some good choices are books that rhyme, which offers predictability and sound recognition for children. Alliteration is the repetition of the first consonant, such as in the alphabet book, "Faint Frogs Feeling Feverish and Other Terrifically Terrorizing Tongue Twisters." Assonance is the repeated use of vowel sounds, such as in the lyrics of "Down by the Bay."

Read and reread the stories and talk about the use of language. Encourage the children to predict the next word or sound.

Sound Synthesis

Help children blend words with a simple jingle.

"It starts with a D and ends with an OG. Put it altogether and it says DOG."

After doing this a time or two, the students will catch on and be able to finish the sentence with the word, successfully blending the sounds.

References

• Michigan: Kindergarten Literacy Activities
• Reading Rockets: Phoneme Awareness Activities
• Utah Education Network: Segmenting and Blending Words