Teaching Children Sound-building Skills
The Phonic Approach to Blending and Segmenting Words
The latest guidelines from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) are outlined in the 2007 guidance “Letters and Sounds: Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics”. This recommends that children be taught basic sound and spelling patterns (the building blocks of words) in a very structured way.
Vowels and Consonants
Children are taught 44 phonemes, usually in a set order and in groups consisting of a mixture of vowels and consonants. This enables children to quickly build up a repertoire of sounds which they can manipulate to read and spell simple (and increasingly complex) words.
An essential sound-building skill is the ability to recognise the sounds within words, for example, to know that the word “coat” comprises /c/ /oa/ /t/. Children, therefore, require lots of oral practise – opportunities to hear spoken words broken down correctly into their phonemes.
Blending and Segmenting Skills
Blending and segmenting skills can be practised by encouraging children to pretend to speak in a “robot voice” - trying to break words into phonemes in order to talk like a robot, and trying to blend sounds together to understand what the robot is saying.
This could be turned into a game as follows (starting with simple words containing no more than three phonemes):
Blending - “Robbie the Robot says stand on one /l/ /e/ /g/”, “Robbie the Robot is feeling /s/ /a/ /d/” or “Robbie the Robot wants a /c/ a/ /ke/”.
Segmenting – have a collection of objects and point to various ones, asking “can you talk like a robot and tell Robbie the Robot what this is?” The collection might include:
- pen (/p/ /e/ /n/)
- bag (/b/ /a/ /g/)
- cup (/c/ /u/ /p/)
- shell (/sh/ /e/ /ll)
- car (/c/ /ar/)
- duck (/d/ /u/ /ck/)
- juice (/j/ /ui/ /ce/)
- shark (/sh/ /ar/ /k/).
If children are not yet able to identify the phonemes within words, they can be encouraged to count the sounds that they hear or clap the rhythm. For example, the adult could say a succession of two- and three-phoneme words, such as:
- ash (2)
- chip (3)
- goat (3)
- pill (3)
- in (2)
- hiss (3)
- lick (3)
- two (2)
- go (2)
- boat (3)
- me (2)
- you (2)
Rhyming Words
When children have learnt a handful of sounds, they can start building words and exploring the possibilities. “Word families” are good way to reinforce common sound and spelling patterns, for example, cat/sat/fat/rat/mat/hat or hot/lot/dot/got/pot. Other spelling patterns include:
- _it
- _og
- _ed
- _ip
- _ing
Building consonant-vowel-consonant (cvc) words will help children to learn about word order (beginning, middle and end sounds). The sequence of phonemes in a word is very important as this can change meaning (for example, the difference between “lost” and “lots”). Playing with cvc words gives children the opportunity to explore the effect of moving sounds from one place to another.
An amusing game to play is “Change It” which starts with a particular cvc word. Players change one phoneme at a time to create a new word (using phoneme flashcards or writing the word down) and continuing until the cvc word is turned back into the original one, as follows:
mat – mad - pad – pod – pot – pat – mat
bed - bet – pet – pit – pat – bat – bad - bed
ham – hat – cat – cot – hot – hut – hum – ham.
The most important thing to remember when developing blending and segmenting skills, is that phonics is a sound-led approach. The emphasis is on the sounds that can be heard in words, rather than individual letters. As children become more confident, their dependency on the “sounding-out” process will reduce and they will start to recognise words by sight. This should be encouraged as it will speed up children’s reading and spelling ability, helping them to become more fluent readers and writers.
Teaching Children Sound-building Skills
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