Consonant Blends & Sight Words for Reading Development | Episode 86

TD Flenaugh discusses strategies for teaching children to read fluently, focusing on consonant blends (CR and FR) and sight words from the Dolch 1000 word list. The episode emphasizes the importance of blending sounds in words and using decodable text to help children recognize patterns and improve reading fluency. Practical activities include oral blending and segmenting of words, letter-sound correspondence, and using pictures to aid second language learners. The passage "Fun at the Crab Pit" is used to illustrate these techniques, encouraging children to sound out words and read with expression. The goal is to provide children with the skills and confidence to read independently.

Transcript

0:00

If you want to make sure your kids are on track to learn how to read fluently, you want to stick around for this episode, and we have a resources for you, the rewrite method and the rewrite method workbook are your go to resource for helping kids to learn to fall in love with writing. It has the tips, tools, resources, strategies and skill building activities to help kids fall out of writing and into loving. To write, get your book set today, to get children to be reading on grade level, it takes specific skills, and the skills that we will be focusing on today has to do with defining blends, showing you passages with blends, and talking about sight words and defining passages with sight words. Hi. Thank you so much for joining the following for learning podcast. We have this podcast to help parents and caregivers with having the resources, strategies and tools needed to make sure that their children are on track for learning and to stay on track for success. All right, let's get into it. First of all, we need to be talking about how we define blends. Now, blends are two or three consonants that are together at the beginning or end of a word. Today, we're going to be focusing on these blends at the beginning of the word, only the letters in a consonant blend work together to make one sound. Now what's really notable here is that all the individual letters can be heard within the pronunciation. So if you look here to the left of the screen, there is b r, which is pronounced b Right. But if you take those two sounds apart, there's for B and for R, so you can hear both sounds, but it is more efficient to blend by putting them all into one sound, bruh, like at the beginning of brother or bridge or bring another example are the CR blend. Is the CR blend so there's CR like at the beginning of crib or crab or Crick or crack, again, individually, both letters, the C and the R, have their sound, CR, sorry for C and like robot or raccoon, but together again, as kids are blending words, it is more efficient. And when I'm saying blending, in this case, I'm saying putting together letters and making words with them, right? Blending words as they're reading. Again, we have the example of PL and DR. DR is a bit tricky. We are not going to have that in our passage today, but I do want to bring up words with the DR blend in front of it, because kids often hear ja, like Jar, but the it is dr, but if you break it down, it's Dr, very tricky, but the words drum, drag have that Dr in front of it, and it blends into one sound, and even kids will be mistaking it for one other letter, such as the j, j instead of Dr. Okay, so the focus of this episode will be specifically CR blended word words with a CR blend at the beginning and fr blend at the beginning. We will also have all short vowel sounds. We will only have words with three or four letters, and we're going to be using sight words from the Dolch 1000 word list to make sure that it is decodable. We are using only the first 300 not 300 words altogether, but words selected from the first 300 and the dolt site word list of 1000 Now the way that I created this list is I put a prompt in chat GPT to. Create a decodable list. A special note, if you are teaching your child to read, you probably have a program or something like that that is already doing a scope and sequence that goes from simple to more complex. I am providing this information on the podcast, showing you how you can make your own decodable text, as well as letting you know the type of scope and sequence that you should be looking for. There are programs out there that have a scope and sequence that aren't from most simple to more complex, and you should be able to judge that if you are at home, especially teaching your child to read, or if you are a teacher that may not have the best program materials, these are also skills that may be overlooked in certain programs because they might just focus on short vowel sounds and they do not focus in on blended letters. Blend blends, right? These are specifically called consonant blends, the CR, the FR, the BL, the FL. So sometimes, when they don't focus on that, we see that some students need more practice with short vowel sounds, and we're not sure what it is they need, and this may be a place to go to give them more support with blended letters and short vowel sounds, blended consonant blends, right and short vowel sounds, so more practice before they maybe get to the long vowel sounds and different things like that. So that's something that you need to note as you are learning how to improve reading for your child, how to give them support. Not sure where to go. This is a place to try it, giving them some consonant blends and giving them a little bit more focus on reading decodable text. Again, the sight word list, again, is a place to go to make sure that your child is recognizing these most used words in text that they're going to encounter, and again, is going to have a direct reflection on how well they are blending words, recognizing words, and reading fluently overall. So we're going to talk about the three letter words that are used in the passage that we're going to be using with our students again at this point, this particular lesson that we're going to go over today is for students who developmentally no short vowel sounds, they have gone over all of the short vowel sound words, three letter words they would have the short U, a, e, i, o, all five, Right. And so examples are run, big pit hop, tap, sit, log, zip. So this is how you would start the phase of the lesson that begins with their phonological awareness. You could give these words to them orally, meaning that you're not writing these words, but you could ask them to blend together oral sounds. For example, if you give them which word is created when you say, and they could say, run right. So next word, iG, they would say, big it, pit, up, hop, app, tap. So again, they should be able to do this as well as the opposite, which is you give them a word and they are able to break it down into its individual sounds, sit, give me the sounds in the word sit, it. Give me the sounds in the word log. Give me the sounds in the word zip, zip. So the students should be able to do that without reading the words, but at least orally, you give them a word and they'll be able to speak it to you, either breaking it down, segmenting, segmenting it into its individual sounds, or reading, blending right? Those individual cells into one word, okay, the next phase of this, right? You could also blend with them those four letter words. So I'm going to give you the oral blending for the four letter words. So first we have the CR blends, and they could tell you crab again. The opposite way, you could ask them crib, break down the sounds in the word crib, ih, and they could break it down, right? So first you give them the sounds, and they tell you the word AB, crab in the other way. Okay, so now I'm going to give you the word break it down for me, into its individual sound. Segment it into its individual sounds. Crib, and they would be able to say, again, the next phase of that, you would actually give the letter sound correspondence. Practicing those sounds and letters, right? You'll give them an A. They tell you that a sound. I like to say a spells at B, spells, C spells, because when we use the letter the terminology spells, they will make the connection when it goes into dictation of actually how to write those words. You are not just practicing letters in isolation, but you will be spelling with those words. You'll be writing later. You'll be reading those words and making that connection by using the word spell instead of saying the word it says right, actually reminding them that they're going to write using these same types of skills and concepts. So when it comes to blending words with letter sound like this is the phonics part. Notice that the word blend is used over and over again. We were talking about oral blending when we don't have to show them words, or you could even use chips or something like that, something to manipulate those sounds, help them break them down orally without letters. But here, when you have the letters and the sounds together, and you write down the word f r o, you write down the letters, F R, O, G, which makes the word frog. You could help them point at each letter and make the sound. And they would say frog. You would take them to the next word, Fran. So sometimes you are telling them how to blend a specific name also known as a proper noun, like the word Fran. You write it down, you help them to blend it for and this is where I also tell students that technique of stretching out the vowel. So students, of course, can blend by saying each individual sound when they're pointing to each letter, but they also could stretch it, and again, because they know the blend you taught them the consonant blend, they could just say for when they get to a they just stretch it for and and that'll help them to hear the word Fran. Okay. So again, if students are having problems blending words together in phonics, letter sound correspondence is to help them read the word, then you could help them with blending by stretching out that vowel The last word is Fred. And the FR blends that are going to be in the passage that they're going to read today, and we do also have gr blends such as grab and grand again, again, you would take the students through each word. Help them blend. You know they need to recognize a consonant blend. Put it together into one sound, gr, AB, gr for the next word is grin. GR in grin. Okay. So another note that we need to make is if your students are having their second language learners, for example, you may want to have pictures of a crab, pictures of a crib, pictures of a frog, right? All of these different things, even picture of the girlfriend or Fred, so that they are making the connection right between the words and the meaning of the words. So very important tip, if you have second language learner, the second language learners where English is not their first language, and they are still learning English when you are blending words with them, when you're reading words with them, when you're doing it orally or with the letter sound correspondence, actually reading words, having pictures of what it is that you are trying to get them to read or understand or say is very key in helping them to come. Comprehend the what you're reading, right, what they're reading, and actually grasping that concept that you're trying to get them to learn. So this is really, really important. Next, I'm going to go over the sight words with students. We're going to point out words that are not following rules, right? Because at this point, students have learned short vowel sounds, they've learned consonant blends, but they didn't know some of these other things, and that's why you teach sight words, but they connect words when you're talking about sentences and paragraphs. So the word and is pretty easy to sound out if students are knowing how to blend and it follows the rules, but it's also a word that they should know, because it's going to be in many, many passages throughout their life. The next word is to here. It does not follow the rules, ooh, O usually says ah or Oh, so that's how you know it does not follow the rules. And let them know here, the T says T, but the O says ooh, mm hmm, the word the. So when students learn this, what I notice is some of them say the because they're make it like that long. E, we know that when we talk most of the time we are saying the we are not usually saying the, and it's not really correct, especially if you guys, you know, were like me, grew up on the King James Version of the Bible. The is a totally different word. Well, you know, just an extra E, but again, that's what we should know, right? T H, E, the like that regular fall um, they may not learn that TD sound, the but, and then the E is a schwa or, uh, like a short U sound as well, you could say because they may not be familiar with the schwa The next word is very simple, as we would think, but sometimes kids get confused. You can just say A, most of the time, we do not say I have a dog. We usually say, I have a dog when we're speaking, we usually say that A, the word that's is spelled a as a, and explaining this to students is important. The next word in again, it follows the rules I, but then the next one does not. It's two letters is i, s, I says I, but s in this case, says, spells, makes the sound of is we don't usually says, is you having a good day? Well, we're like, Is Is he here yet? Is he here yet? No, we say is so letting them know that this time the S is saying spelling or making the sound of z, that again, they may not, they may not know that TD blend th, which is a vowel diagraph that says at, so again, it is a sight word at this point, because we may not have taught them the vowel diagraph, sorry, consonant diagraph of t8 that says and then on, also follows the rules. Ah. So after you go through this with them, make sure they read it from beginning to end in a more fluent way. Of course, these are not sentences, but just getting in the habit of reading it smoothly, so they're not blending out the words every time, or maybe they have to go through it two or three times, so they're no longer blending or more, as we know, sometimes it takes more and to the uh, in is that on? So those are the sight words for this passage we're going to be reading today. So today. Let's finally get into the passage we're going to be reading. It's called fun at the crab pit, and really it is a decodable passage. So I really want to highlight the fact that you should be helping your child read it the first time by going to each word and sounding it out as they need to. You may find that they are starting to recognize words without sounding out every word again. You also can read one one sentence and then have them read the next sentence, right? Or if you have more than one kid that you're working with, have one kid read one sentence, another kid read another sentence, and the expectation is everyone is following along with their finger as they read. So always have them read the title. I noticed that kids want to jump right into the. Actual text and ignore the title as they are going to be reading. The point of reading is to be able to comprehend or understand whatever they're reading. So it is really, really, really important that they are actually sounding out the words right. So it's not sounding out the words. It's really important that they understand the words right? They understand what they're reading. Again, fun at the crab pit. So you might start with the title with them, and then have them read, and they may need to sound out each word give them encouragement. And again, it's going to be pretty slow for a lot of students as they're beginning, and that's okay, encourage, encourage. And let me say it one more time, encourage. Okay, Fran and Fred run to the crab pit and you want to say it's okay if you made a mistake. Help them with the word again, a big crab hops up so it might be their turn, then your turn. Fran grabs a rock fry Fred. Taps the crab. The crab runs. Fred grins, that crab is fast. Fran spots a frog. The frog hops in, plop. Frog in the pit. Fran yells, Fred runs to the frog. The frog slips out. That frog is quick. Fred yells, the PAL sit on a log, crabs and frogs, zip and hop. Fran grins, okay, so again, I'm going to tell you again, resist the urge to read this passage to them the first time. Resist the urge reading a passage to them the first time this is a decodable passage. Give them the experience of reading a passage on their own. The more you do this, the more they'll set that expectation of independence and reading on their own. And they'll get better and better and better at this. It will start off slow. They will be sounding out the word Fran every time, and that's okay. That is the process. Give them encouragement and more encouragement, and help them sound out each word. Okay. The next thing that you do after you do that, first read you've noticed is that I have underlined every word. Underline every word. Sorry, I didn't say that. I didn't mean to say that we're underlining specifically the FR, the consonant blends. So I'm not going to do all the consonant blends. I just want them to to do the ones, maybe the one that you see that stands out the most, like maybe every time they see Fran and Fred, they're trying to say, and instead of an so you want to say, Okay, guys, let's read it again, but this time, we're going to go through and underline all the FR consonant blends. And again, you're marking up the text, underlining fr, okay, there's an FR, there's an FR. The point of this is you're getting them in the habit to recognizing patterns when they're reading, if they're recognizing patterns, it helps them on the phase of becoming more fluent in their reading. Now, some people, and I say this over and over again, some people say, Oh, yep, fluency is like speed reading, and it is not. It is not. It is not. Fluency. Is about reading like you're speaking. When I read it the first time, I was not reading with fluency. I wasn't blending all the I wasn't sounding out all the words or anything like that. But it wasn't like I was talking. So I will model how to do this. Fun at the crap pit. Fran and Fred run to the crab pit. A big crab pops up. Fran grabs a rock. Fred taps the crab. The crab runs. Fred grins, that crab is fast. Fran spots a frog. The frog hops in, plop. Frog in the pit. Fran yells. Fred runs to the frog. The frog slips out. That frog is quick. Fred yells the PAL sit on a log, crabs and frogs zip and hop. Fran grins. So as you can see, I am using expression. I am, you know, if there's an exclamation point, I am using, you know, again, some emotion when I'm reading, I am reading like I'm talking. This is a very simple passage, so again, it's a little bit harder because it's just really predictable text, but you can see that I could just tell you that story. Obviously it's not really the way people talk, the way it's written, but the more they get into the. Habit. You model it for them. So after they've gone through and kind of struggled through, blended the words whatever, and read that first passage, then they've read it a second time, going through and underlining the FR that third time, you could read it for them in a fluent way. Remember, I told you a way and a middle way is to have them read a sentence, you read a sentence, have them read a sentence, you read a sentence. Or, again, if they're multiple students, have them, you know, take turns. So again, that's a way, but you don't want to go through and just read the whole thing for them the first time, they are going to have a little struggle, and that's fine. Go back, go back. Think back when your child was learning how to walk. You cannot take those steps for them. When they have to fall after that first step. You can't just pick them up and take care of them and make sure it's okay for them. They need to go to that process. And our five and six year olds are now running around, maybe moving faster than we are, and they only got there because they struggle to make those steps, not because you pick them up when they fail, every time they fail, and you say, I'm just going to pick them up and carry them around because I don't want them to fall No. Struggling is part of the process, the encouragement that you give them, the patience that you give them when they are sounding out crab for the fifth time in the passage, and maybe you're like, they should know it. Encourage, encourage, encourage, okay, that's how we get there. So we're going to do a quick review defining blends. Right? We went over some blends. Those are two or three consonants that are together at the beginning of a word, the letters in the consonant blend work together to make one sound, but individually they all keep their individual sound. Okay, so bruh CR, right, and so on. They make they both have their sounds. Sounds stay the same, but when they're blending these words, letter sounds, correspondence as they're reading it through the phonics part, they should be saying, bruh, they shouldn't say. It slows them down as they're blending. Okay, the focus of this episode were the CR and the FR consonant blends. They had short vowel sounds, right? We only had three or four letters, and we had the sight words from the Dolch 1000 word list. We only used words the sight words that were from the first 300 words to keep it very simple and predictable for young readers. Now, if you following me, you know, make sure that you know that you should implement try out these things with your child. Try it out with your students, because this is going to make the difference for your children, giving them the competitive advantage, right? This podcast is about making sure they're on track and that they have that competitive advantage. Thanks again for joining us. Thanks again for supporting the falling for learning podcast. New Episodes go live every Saturday at 5pm you can watch us on youtube.com at falling for learning, or listen on all major podcast platforms such as Apple, Google, Audible, Spotify and much more for More resources, visit falling in love with learning.com we really appreciate you. Have a wonderful week. You.