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The Blending Game is an interactive phonemic awareness activity that teaches blending and segmentation of words containing 3 sounds, like mouse, church, dog.
Each sample set of The Blending Game comes with 20 picture cards and detailed instructions for teaching blending and segmentation. Segmentation is the most important beginning reading skill because it allows a child to understand how spoken and written words map onto each other and facilitates the understanding of the alphabetic principle.
The Blending Game Lesson Concept
- Give vocabulary of pictures in set.
- Place 2 pictures before the child, giving the names as you do.
- Using the sounds (phonemes) of the spoken word, ask the child to give you the one of the pictures. Example: Susan, please give me the /m/……/ow/……/s/.
- Child blends the 3 sounds and chooses the correct picture. This isn’t hard because the child can see the pictures and knows the vocabulary of them.
- After you’ve gone through the set in this manner, increase the challenge (and fun) by hiding a picture from the child’s view and then giving the 3 sounds for him to blend. Keep the sounds close enough together so that the child is successful every time.
- When the child needs more challenge, increase the spacing of the 3 sounds he must blend.
- Example: Susan, guess what the picture is. It’s a /ch/……/ur/……/ch/.
- Note: the entire time you are giving 3 sounds for the child to blend, you are modeling segmentation. So eventually the child will start to segment the sounds from the picture cards as you have done. The most effective way to teach segmentation is to model it by playing The Blending Game many, many times.
- After the child can segment, then the cards can be used independently by the child to practice segmentation of the pictures, placing a game piece or penny on the circles as he says the 3 sounds.