Action Step of the Week: Sound-by-Sound Blending
Perhaps this is the most powerful action step to accelerate reading growth - teachers, teaching assistants, paraprofessionals, and even bus drivers. Let's load up and get kids reading.
Action Step of the Week
Every time you have students decoding an unknown word, practice the sound-by-sound blending routine:
Cue students to say the sound by pointing to each letter or group of letters that represent a sound (i.e. 1 finger for s and /s/, 2 fingers for ee for the /ē/).
After each sound, sweep the sounds you have touched slowly, dipping slightly down. Students blend the sound at your pace.
Slowly dip the whole word.
Sweep the word quickly. Students read the word fluently.
Why?
Let’s start with the most obvious reason: our kids must learn to read. As a professor, I cannot site a real source here but I believe this is the most powerful action step we can assign and practice.
The sound-by-sound blending routine, or successive blending or additive blending, involves blending one sound at a time as you work through the word.
I like this lady’s style. This video shows an introduction to the sound-by-sound blending routine. Once the routine is down, this can be slightly adapted to practice continuous blending - reading words on the fly.
/c/ ... /a/ ... /t/ ... cat
1. Say the first sound in the word (/c/)
2. Then say the next sound (/a/) while holding on to the first sound
3. Then say the next sound (/t/) while holding on to the previous sounds
4. Finally, blend all the sounds together smoothly to make the whole word ("cat")
This type of blending allows students to slowly work through the process of sounding out a word and reinforces each individual letter sound.
Use Continuous Sounds: Begin with phonemes that can be held continuously without distorting the sound. Have students practice continuous blending, such as “aaaammmm… am.”
Introduce Stop Sounds Gradually: Start with stop sounds at the ends of words (e.g., "at," "up") before moving to words with stop sounds at the beginning (e.g., "be," "go").1
Research supports the effectiveness of the sound-by-sound blending routine for teaching early reading skills. A study by Gonzalez-Frey and Ehri (2020) in Scientific Studies of Reading demonstrated that "connected phonation" (aka Blend As You Read or continuous blending) yielded better outcomes than segmented decoding (i.e., "/s/ /t/ /o/ /p/"...."stop").2 The U.S. National Reading Panel report also supports repeated oral reading with guidance, which includes the sound-by-sound blending routine.
Potential Evidence
Students struggle to decode words (with and without guidance)
There is no explicit modeling of sound-by-sound blending (i.e. “what’s this word? How about this word?”).
Students don’t have coping strategies when they get to unknown words. They give up easily.
NOTE: This action step is PERFECT for new teachers just learning the curriculum.
Questions to ask yourself
What are students actually doing when they are reading words?
On what sounds do they get tripped up? Is there a pattern?
How many words did the students actually read in the specified amount of time?
Did students master the phonics lesson?
Do students know how to face unknown words? What do you actually SEE them doing? (i.e. are they using their fingers, visually breaking apart the word, etc.).
Is the teacher brand new and needs to know how to meet curriculum expectations?
Can the students blend sounds? Do they have phonemic awareness?
Glossary of Terms
Sound-by-Sound Blending (Successive/Additive Blending): A reading instruction method where individual sounds (phonemes) in a word are pronounced in sequence and blended together without pauses to form the word. (Example: For the word "cat," the sounds /k/, /a/, and /t/ are blended smoothly as "caaaat.")
Continuous/Whole Word Blending: A technique within sound-by-sound blending where the sounds are connected smoothly without interruption (Example: "Mmmmaaaannn" for the word "man."). It is both practiced within the routine and what is practiced once students gain fluency with certain sound patterns/what they can practice on the go- in grocery stores).
Segmenting: Breaking down a word into its individual sounds or syllables before blending them back together. (Example: Saying "c-a-t" and then blending to say "cat.")
Synthetic Phonics: An approach to phonics where students learn to convert letters into sounds (phonemes) and then blend these sounds to form words (Example: Learning the sounds /s/, /a/, and /t/ and blending them to read "sat.").
Analytic Phonics: An approach where students learn to analyze whole words to detect phonetic or orthographic patterns and then apply this knowledge to decode new words (Example: Identifying the common "at" sound in "cat," "bat," and "hat.").
Onset-Rime Blending: A method where the initial sound (onset) of a word is blended with the remaining part of the word (rime) (Example: For "cat," blending the onset /k/ with the rime /at/.).
Elkonin Boxes (Sound Boxes): A visual tool used to help students segment words into individual sounds by placing markers in boxes for each sound.
Phoneme Manipulation: Activities that involve adding, deleting, or substituting sounds in words to create new words (Example: Changing the /c/ in "cat" to /r/ to make "rat.").
Coaching Conversation Template
How to use it:
Find any bracketed text.
Fill this in BEFORE you meet with the teacher. You will look silly and I would feel sad. Only use ONE of the evidence examples.
Be you! You can do it. The best coaches are planned coaches.
Praise/Follow Up on Previous Action Steps
I appreciate the opportunity to sit down with you to discuss my observation.
First, I want to follow up on <previous action step or feedback>. I am really excited to say that you have mastered this action step! Tell me more about how this is going for you. What impact has this had on you and your students?
Today, I saw <positive evidence of specific teacher action>.
What impact does this move have on you and your students?
Evidence
Today, I want to get a bit deeper into content and focus on a way to help build skill in decoding words.
<students struggle to decode> (i.e. During your phonics lesson today, 4 out of 6 were able to master 80% of the words. The main gap is represented in how Marlene decoded the word. She said “bar” for “blair.” What stands out to you about that error?).
<no explicit modeling> (i.e. Today, I saw you do your small group lesson. There was a key element of the lesson plan. Go ahead and read through the lesson plan and think about what was missing from what you did today.)
<coping with decoding> (i.e. Today, while I was walking around and kids were reading, I noticed 4 kids who got stuck on words. When I asked them to show me how they read through hard words, they sort of shrugged at me. I want to challenge you to teach and reinforce a blending routine for all unknown words. How does that sound?)
Action Step
Great, so here is your action step: Every time you have students decoding an unknown word, practice the sound-by-sound blending routine:
Cue students to say the sound by pointing to each letter or group of letters that represent a sound (i.e. 1 finger for s and /s/, 2 fingers for ee for the /ē/).
After each sound, sweep the sounds you have touched slowly, dipping slightly down. Students blend the sound at your pace.
Slowly dip the whole word.
Sweep the word quickly. Students read the word fluently.
What impact will this have on you and your classroom?
Go ahead and write down the action step.
Plan/Practice
Let me show you what this looks like with the lesson that I observed.
MODEL
I have these words from the lesson that you gave <write out 3-4 words from the lesson observed on a whiteboard>. You are going to play the students.
<Prep note: Please practice this yourself before you do this in front of a teacher>
What are the steps of the sound-by-sound blending routine? What did you see?
PLAN
Let’s practice this for tomorrow. Pull up your lesson plan and spend a few minutes to read it. Find your word list. Think about how you will do routine with this sound pattern.
PRACTICE
Now, let’s practice execution. I’ll play the students.
In the second round of practice, make an audible error and have the teacher practice the correction.
Look for:
Proper finger positioning, including the sweeps
Accurate sounds
Clear articulation (exaggerated mouth movements)
Pauses to correct when appropriate
Directions are firm and kind
Body positioning allows for the students to see
Appropriate pacing of sounds
What impact will this blending routine have on you and your students?
Closing/Follow-Up Up
Thanks for playing along. Practice can be awkward, but it is a great way to ensure we can work out all the kinks.
Let’s review the action step.
To follow up, I would love to see this in action. I look forward to on <date>.
https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/blending-and-segmenting-games
https://readingsimplified.com/teach-blending-sounds-read-words/