Blending and Segmenting Tips for Student Success

If you teach early reading, consider how you are teaching your students to read. Do you teach students to memorize words? Or, do you teach them to sound out a word and to depend on their knowledge of phonetic sounds? Two important skills that early readers must develop are the ability to blend and segment words.

Blending involves pulling together individual sounds or syllables within words; segmenting involves breaking words down into individual sounds or syllables. These are two different foundational skills that will assist children in the art of reading for most of their reading careers.

How do students develop Blending and Segmenting skills?

Blending and segmenting words is a skill developed in both phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Remember, phonemic awareness is all done orally, without print, and phonics learning is done with print. This blog post will focus on blending and segmenting with print, specifically.  Like most phonics concepts, students will find more success if the skills are first developed orally through phonemic awareness activities before developing them with print.

When working with young readers who are attempting to figure out a word, I often hear students say the sounds of each letter in a word and then say the whole word.

Is this blending? No, it is not. It is segmenting.  The student has said each sound and then figured out how to put them together, but there is no connection between the sounds in the word.

If students can segment a word, like above, do they still need to learn to blend? Yes! Students need to know how to connect the sounds together so that when they encounter bigger words, the skills are in place.  Teaching a student to both segment and blend a word gives them the building blocks for reading success.  

The missing skill of my second graders who struggled in reading was blending.  They could not connect the sounds together, and thus, couldn’t figure out the word.

What does it mean to blend sounds together?

Once students know several common sounds, such as s, m, a, t, n, it is time to help students blend those sounds together into simple words.  Blending means that students are connecting the sounds together without stopping in between each sound.  This can be a difficult skill for students to grasp.  

As a teacher, it is helpful to teach this skill in both whole group and during small group instruction so that you can listen to each individual student.  Some students will also need you right next to them helping them blend the sounds continuously until they understand that it has to be smooth.

A couple of key things to remember when teaching students to blend sounds

Practice, Practice, Practice

As much as you can.  Really. It’s all about the practice.  Practice whole group.  Practice in small groups.  Give parents some ways to practice at home.  Don’t go overboard, but if you can blend and segment sounds several times throughout the day, students will find success with the process.

Start with Continuous Sounds

Students will find more success if you start with continuous sounds. Common sounds to start with include s, m, a, n.  There are more, but those sounds tend to be the first ones students learn.  As students find success with those sounds add one more sound to the mix and continue practicing.

Connect a Stop Sound to the Continuous Sound After It

When blending with stop sounds, start by using the stop sounds at the end of a word, like mat. Students can quickly stop blending at that final sound.  As students become proficient with blending continuous sounds, move on to blending stop sounds at the beginning of words, like cat.  When blending with stop sounds at the beginning of the word, it is often helpful to prompt students to blend the stop sound with the continuous sound next to it.  For instance in cat, the ca would be blended together.

Elongate the sounds

Be sure that when you (or the students) are saying the continuous sounds you elongate the continuous sounds. Really. Overemphasize them. You want students to hear all the sounds in the word.

Connect the sounds

As students are blending the sounds in the word, be sure that they’re connecting each sound together. Often, I will hear students elongate the first sound, pause slightly and then start the second sound. Listen carefully and be sure that students are connecting all the sounds together throughout the word.

What does it mean to segment sounds?

Segmenting sounds is the opposite of blending sounds. While segmenting sounds is an important reading skill, I find that the best application for it is for writing. If students can hear and say each sound in a word and match it to a symbol, they can write words!

Some things to keep in mind when teaching students to segment sounds

Below are some things to be aware of when you teach students to segment sounds. They may not seem like significant changes to your practice, but sometimes the small changes can help your struggling learners anchor their new learning.

Have Students Use their Hands and Fingers

Little kids are tactile creatures. They love using their hands. Teach students to use their hands to count the sounds in a word.

I have students hold up a fist on their right hand. It’s important that they use their right hand because when counting, they start with their index finger and move to the right. It’s the same way we read, from left to right. Have students say each sound and raise a finger for each sound that they say.

So for cat, they would say, /c/, /a/, /t/ and each sound would be a different finger.  Do that over and over again with different words.

Keep in mind that developing this skill orally through phonemic awareness activities is best.  Then move on to phonics activities that include print.

Make Stop Sounds Quick

When counting sounds, be sure that the stop sound has a distinct, quick stop sound. Be sure that the stop sounds don’t have a schwa sound attached to the end of it. The schwa sound is that -uh sound that you sometimes hear people put at the end of a sound, like buh, duh, etc.  Don’t elongate stop sounds.  We don’t say buh-a-t.  It’s b-a-t.

Often, when teaching students about stop sounds, I’ll have them hold their hand in front of their mount and feel their breath. When a stop sound stops, there’s a little puff of breath. Try it.  Do you get that puff of air at the end of /p/?  Now, try putting a schwa sound at the end and say puh.  Do you feel the air at the end of the sound?  No, because you tacked on that schwa.  That’s one way to tell if you (or the students) are saying the word correctly.

Make Continuous Sounds a little bit longer, but not too long

When students say a continuous sound, don’t make it too long. You don’t want students to blend the sounds but count them quickly. There will be a difference between how a stop and continuous sound is heard. Try it. Segment cat, rat, man, can. Can you hear the difference between the /r/ in rat and the /c/ in cat?

Resources to Teach Blending and Segmenting for Most Phonics Patterns

Do you need some resources to teach blending and segmenting to your early readers? Here are a few of my favorite resources. Resources are also available on TPT.

Blending cards are available for most phonics patterns and include both blending and segmenting cues as well as images!

How do you teach blending and segmenting?

When using print, I often use dots and looped lines, like in the photo above.  It really helps students to see the individual sounds in each word.

Do you have any tips for teaching blending and segmenting?  I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

In the above photo are pictures of my CVC Cut and Paste Cards.  They’re a traditional worksheet that can be transformed into a ring of review cards.  If you’d more information on them, click here.

We have also created Phonics Worksheets that utilize these blending cues.  Check out the Short A Phonics Worksheets and the Short I Worksheets.  These worksheets have 18 different templates with over 140 usable pages per vowel.