How to Motivate Your Child to Read

Robin

says: Customer Service

I’m sorry your granddaughter is struggling, Jenny.

Blending sounds to read (decode) a word is a difficult skill for some children. Our Helping Kids Sound Out Words blog post may be useful for you.

Here are some other tips that may help:

– First, spend some time working on phonological awareness skills with her. Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in language, things like rhyming, being able to identify the first or last letter in a word, being able to count syllables in a word, and so on. Children that struggle with these skills will often struggle with blending sounds into words. We have a Fun Ways to Develop Phonological Awareness article discusses these skills further and has printable games and activities for working on them.

– Make sure to work on reading daily. (You probably are already doing that, but I always like to double-check!) We recommend working for about 20 minutes per day on reading, but it is best to do even shorter lessons if your student grows tired or frustrated sooner.

– Make sure your granddaughter is solid on the phonogram sounds. If she doesn’t know some of them automatically, there are free downloads you can use for fun review in this article on How to Teach Phonograms.

– Review the Blending Procedure at the start of each day. (Before anything else.) You want to make sure she is doing every step as shown our Helping Kids Sound Out Words blog post. This is what the blending procedure will be like:

First, point to each letter and say the sounds. “/p/-/ă/-/t/”
Second, draw the finger under the first two letters. Blend those and then point to and say the last sound. This cumulative blending step is really important for kids who tend to forget the sounds or mix them up if they try to jump from the first step to the fourth. “/pă/-/t/”
Third, draw the finger slowly under all three letters and blend those. “/păt/”
Fourth, say it fast or “say it like a word.”
It may be that focusing on cumulative blending helps your child with this difficulty. It often does for children.

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However, it sounds like you may need to model the full blending procedure for your grandchild and then have her do it for the exact same word. You may need to model every word for her this way for a while before she can do it easily. But once she can do it easily, try changing just the first letter and see if she can blend the new word without you modeling it first. If she has trouble with it, then model it for her and then have her do it so she can have success with it.

The Change-the-Word activities in the All About Reading Teacher’s Manual are especially helpful for working on blending and paying attention to ALL sounds in a word. Change one letter at a time, starting with simple 3-sound words like: bat-sat-sit-sip-tip-top…and so on. You do not have to wait until this is scheduled in the Teacher’s Manual but can do it as often as is helpful for your child.

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Work on oral blending. You say the sounds of a word you are thinking of, and then she blends them into a word. Can she guess a word that you mean if you just say the sounds? Do easy 3-sound words first, like /k/-/ī/-/t/ (kite). This is a game that can help develop her blending skills. If she can blend orally, then she is well on her way to being able to blend written words.

You can make this easier to do it as a part of an “I-Spy” game. Say, “I spy with my little eye something that sounds like /s/-/ŏ/-/k/.” (Choosing something that is within her line of sight makes it easier.)

Let her say sounds for you to blend too, even if they make nonsense words. Laugh and have fun with it! Hearing you blend sounds can help her begin to hear how individual sounds change slightly when they are blended.

If you are on our Facebook Support group, here’s a great video that a mom shared about teaching her daughter oral blending. If you aren’t in the group already, you can request to join, and we’ll get you approved.

Another thing that you can do with kids that’s fun: (First, the teacher demonstrates this, and then the child mimics.) Lay three sheets of colored paper on the floor. Write one letter on each sheet of paper, like M – A – P. Jump on the first paper and say /mmmmm/. Jump on the second paper and say /ăăăăă/. Jump on the third paper and say /p/. Then start over, and do it quicker: /mmmmăăăă/-/p/, and then /mmmmmmăăăăăp/. Finally, run across the papers and say “MAP!” You can do a similar activity on the table with a race car and letters written on index cards.

You can also play oral segmenting games–say a word that has 2 or 3 sounds, and see if she can say the sounds in that word. Here’s a video that demonstrates how to segment sounds. (This video also talks about spelling, but don’t work on that yet–just segmenting words orally.)

Another game I used to play with my kids–I would pull down 3 letter tiles such as c, t, and a. I would draw 3 blanks on the board and say, “I want to make the word cat. What’s the first sound in cat?” (/k/) “Right! Which letter should I put first?” (see if he puts the C in the blank, or help her do that). “Good! What’s the second sound in cat? /kăăăăt/” (/ăăă/) and so on. See if she can help you make the 3-sound word, and then model how to sound it out and read it using the full blending procedure.

Just play around with the tiles and other activities and games for a few weeks and see if she starts to catch on to blending.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have questions or need anything else.