A 6-page workshop handout.
A 6-page workshop handout.
The Blending Game is an interactive phonemic awareness activity that teaches children how to segment spoken words into individual phonemes. 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 child’s understanding of the alphabetic principle.
This first chapter of my next book describes the importance of this simple, but crucial phonemic awareness task. The ability to isolate the beginning sound of a word is the developmentally appropriate point of readiness for letter-learning work to begin.
Listen to Randall discuss the importance of beginning sound isolation as it relates to the child’s understanding of the alphabetic principle. (1:48)
The following is a list of the 1,000 most common words in the English language. The words are arranged in approximate order of spelling difficulty. The first 109 words make up 50% of everything we read in English. If a beginning reader, a struggling reader or a confused reader can spell these words correctly, then they can read these words. In addition, these words contain many of the orthographic (spelling) patterns and morphemic (meaning) patterns that the child will encounter again and again. Reading success must be built on mastery of a sequence of skills and knowledge. Every first grader must know these words (or words from a similar list) to mastery. Their future reading success may depend on it.
Written English uses 26 letters individually and in combinations to represent the approximately 44 sounds in our spoken language.
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On this audio file (4.15 Mb), Randall discusses how he introduces decoding to a young student.