STEP BY STEP: 2 BLENDING AND LEARNING WORDS

Blending is the process of saying individual sounds in a word and then running them together to make a word.
e.g. s – a – t = sat
Normally teachers begin with easy vowel-consonant words such as "at" or "on", and consonant-vowel-consonant words like for example "pin", "jam" or "pot". Children are first encouraged to use the actions for each sound to spell out the word, then, with practice, they learn to blend them. To help them put blending into context, phonics books can be used: there are very simple stories written using only (or mostly)CVC words, but in English we can also find a series of words which cannot be read by phonic pronunciation, so at the same time, children are taugh “tricky” words and high frequency words: “Brick Words”, the irregular parts of these words have to be remembered. We call this sight reading. Oxford Reading Tree books are great for the children to develop their reading, for they have different stages which use repetitive structures made of all these words and sounds, the children know the characters and love their adventures.
Examples of tricky words: into, the, all, I, look