Oral blending is...
An early-stage phonics and spelling approach that encourages children to focus on the individual sounds they hear. They do all this without seeing any letters, making it a really useful approach when trying to encourage sound recognition and before they start to identify individual graphemes and their connections to phonemes.
If every word is made up of individual sounds and children can hear each of the sounds within a given word, then they should be able to identify words.
Oral Blending involves listening out for those individual sounds and trying to make a word from them.
If a child hears the separately pronounced sounds /d/ /o/ /g/ they don’t need to know what those sounds or letters look like to be able to create a word from them.
If they ‘squash’, or ‘blend’ the sounds together and start to say them quicker they can hear the word forming.
Why is oral blending important?
Oral blending helps children develop their phonemic awareness. This is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual phonemes (sounds) in spoken words.
The skill is crucial for reading and spelling. Children are able to confidently segment words by hearing and recognising different phonemes (sounds).
When they then move from oral blending into recognising graphemes and their connections to phonemes their reading (and spelling) will improve as well.
Try one of our fun blending quizzes
How can I help my child with oral blending at home?
Find the item I’m saying
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I Spy
You can also do simple things. For example, when reading a book with your child, encourage them to repeat back the sounds they hear in certain words you read. For example, you say the word “cat” and encourage your child to repeat back to you the segmented version of “/c/ – /a/ – /t/”.
