Teaching & Learning Page

Phonemic Awareness : The Power of Blending

In Foundation, children learn an important early reading skill called phonemic awareness. This is the ability to hear and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in words. 

One of the most important parts of phonemic awareness is blending - putting sounds together to make a word. For example, when children hear the sounds /m/ /a/ /p/, and they can blend them together to say map, they are developing the skills needed to read.

Blending is powerful because when children can hear sounds and push them together smoothly, they are much more ready to connect these sounds to letters during phonics.  Research shows that strong phonemic awareness in the early years is a key predictor of later reading success.

 In our Foundation classrooms, we practice blending through short engaging tasks such as:

• Stretching sounds and “pushing them together” to make a word
• Using actions or hand movements to blend sounds
• Play listening games where they guess the word from the sounds

It often looks like play, but these small sound games are doing a great job to build your child's reading development.

Here at Surfside, we focus on building these strong sound foundations early so that children grow into confident and capable readers - one sound at a time!