Lessons · Teaching · blending and segmenting
Blending and segmenting are two different jobs
Blending is pushing separate sounds together into a word and segmenting is pulling a word apart into its sounds; blending is what reading needs and segmenting is what spelling needs.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
What it is for
A child stuck on a word is nearly always stuck on one of these two, and they are not the same job. Knowing which one is missing is the difference between help that works and saying 'sound it out' a bit louder.
How to think about it
Test them separately, out loud, with no print in the room. Say the sounds and ask for the word, which is blending. Say the word and ask for the sounds, which is segmenting. Keep two scores, because they do not arrive together.
Worked example
Blend: teacher says m, a, p. Child says map.Reading, without a single letter in the room.
Segment: teacher says map. Child says m, a, p.Spelling, without a single letter in the room.
Two columns, each out of 10, kept apartA child can be nine out of ten on one and three out of ten on the other.
Start at 2 and 3 sounds, then 4Length is the difficulty. Four-sound words with a blend at the front come last.
Your turn
A child scores 9 out of 10 on blending and 4 out of 10 on segmenting. Write the line that gives the gap.
9 - 4 =
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Scoring them as one number called phonemic awareness. A single score hides which of the two jobs is missing, and the two need different practice.