Blending interventions, no way! We were learning letter names, learning letter sounds, (phonemes), and then blending those sounds whole group! We were trucking along, and this teacher thought we were all on track. But October hit, with ALL THE ASSESSMENTS, and I discovered that about half of my kiddos cannot blend the sounds of three letters (graphemes) into a word. AKA reading. I was in desperate need of a blending interventions for my students.
Don’t get me wrong, I had about 5 rock stars, about 5 almost there, but the rest….. They could definately say the letter sounds, but when they blended the phonemes together I would get something close but with a different beginning or ending phoneme, or I would get something not even close.
This blog post is going to be about my blending inventions and how I helped those guys who were not even close. But don’t you worry, those different beginning or ending guys have their own posts!
Where to begin with blending interventions:
To begin with, my little guys needed the most intervention, I knew I had to find their breakdown and fix that as we moved forward.
I knew we needed to get away with the print, so I gave them three phonemes orally to blend, and this was not successful. So, I also tried just two, so thinking about the phonological continuum, I next went to onset and rime. With that info, I gave my students the onset and rhyme of CVC words, this was a challenge, so I added manipulatives to my small group instruction for the kiddos who were ready for onset and rime blending, and went back to compound words for others.
If you are wondering about the manipulatives I used for my blending intervention, I got out a small foam square for the onset and a larger rectangular square for the rime. We spent a lot of time touching the onset square and the rime squares while saying phonemes faster and faster until we were saying the whole word.
After we were rocking those rimes, we began blending two phonemes, then three orally. Once students were blending orally, we added in some print! With modeling and lots of support (we do), students began blending two and three-letter words!
And now we are reading with blending interventions:
From blending words, we added in heart words that students had mapped and students started reading short sentences! The sky was the limit from there.
Are you wondering about those kiddos who went back to compound words? Well, once they were able to orally blend (with manipulatives) compound words, we worked on them without manipulatives and then moved on to onset and rime! After that, we worked our way up.
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