Teach Your Child to Blend Letters and Sounds

What is blending? In phonics, blending is the ability to recognize sounds and manipulate them in order to read words. To blend, children must first say each sound and then blend them together. For example, if you say each of these sounds, /c/ /a/ /t/, and blend them together, you get the word cat.

Children must be able to blend parts of words together and recombine them easily to read words they don’t know and to acquire fluency (the ability to read accurately with speed and expression). Although many children learn to blend sounds independently, others must be taught the process step by step. The sooner a child learns to blend, the more easily he will learn to read fluently.

A great way to teach blending is to start with cvc (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, for example, fan. Words that start and end with the sounds /f/, /v/, /n/, /m/, /l/, and /s/ are easier to blend because they can be drawn out: /ffffaaaannnn/.Have the child say each sound of the word fan, pausing after each sound:/f/-/a/-/n/. Have the child repeat the sounds again, this time by holding each sound as they move to the next.: /fff//aaa//nnn/. Repeat several times a little faster until the sounds are blended and the child can read the word: /fffaaannn/, /ffaann/, fan.

You can give your kids a head start by helping them learn to read a few words before they even start school. We’ve made it easy for you: Here’s a script for teaching them to blend sounds to read the word mat:
Parent: ‘When you see a letter, make its sound: (letter a) /aaa/’
Child: ‘/aaa/’
Parent: ‘(letter t) /t/’
Child: ‘/t/’
Parent: ‘Now, say both sounds: /aaa/ /t/, /aaa/ /t/’
Child: ‘/aaa/ /t/, /aaa/ /t/’
Parent: ‘A little faster: /aa/ /t/, /aa/ /t/’
Parent: ‘Now, a little faster: /a/ /t/, /a/ /t/’
Child: ‘/a/ /t/, /a/ /t/’
Parent: ‘Now, say the sounds together, starting at the left and moving to the right. Ready? /at/, /at/.’
Child: ‘/at/, /at/’
Parent: ‘Now. Let’s add one more sound: /mmm/ /at/, /mmm/ /at/.’
Child: ‘/mmm/ /at/, /mmm/ /at/’
Parent: ‘Now, blend the sounds together, starting from the left and moving to the right: /mmaat/, /mmaat/.
Child: ‘/mmaat/, /mmaat/’
Parent: ‘One more time: mat.’
Child: ‘mat’
Parent: ‘You read mat!’

Watch this clip for a visual representation of this blending lesson…

Reading Tips

• Here are a few reading tips and strategies that will encourage children of all ages to love reading and become life-long readers!

• Set aside ‘special time’ for reading with your child: This will encourage your child to develop a reading routine that will make reading part of his/her daily life. Read to your child everyday, if you can! 8-17

• Create a ‘Reading Space’ in your home. A comfortable chair, a library of fun and interesting books, a fuzzy rug, anything that makes your child feel comfortable and ready to learn. Your child will know that entering this ‘Reading Space’ signals a learning mind set.

• Have books and printed materials available everywhere. Not just i the library or the bookshelves—in the car, in the bathroom, on the beach. Let your child get ‘Hooked On Reading’ by making books and printed materials omnipresent.

• Read aloud to your child—and let your child read aloud to you. Children love to be the center of attention and showing off their skills. Encourage your ‘emerging’ reader with positive reinforcement, ‘What a nice story’, ‘You are such a good reader!’, ‘That was very close, it’s pronounced ENCHANTED’.

• Ham it up! Make funny voices and sound effects. Children love the theatrical aspects of reading ‘in character’.

We just won another award!

Well this is exciting news and what fun for me to be the one to tell you! Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read has just won another award! (We're on a roll here...)

We just won the Dr. Toy’s 100 Best Children’s Products Award for 2009 and to celebrate we’re offering a 40% discount on Learn to Read Pre-K to 2nd Grade.

Just go to http://www.hookedonphonics.com/learn-to-read-pre-k-2nd-grade and enter this code: SAVE40

(Hurry, though, this offer expires 10/09/09)

Is it gauche to say congratulations to ourselves? Nah...

Congratulations to us!

Learning to Print

How many of us remember learning to print? As an adult, it’s really second-nature, isn’t it? It’s hard to think back and remember trying to get the order of the lines right and just the right proportions of the letters.

It’s in Pre-K and Kindergarten where children usually get their first exposure to organized learning and where they begin to learn about the world, usually through play. This is where you and I were most likely introduced to the very basics of the alphabet, and that certain letters make certain sounds, not to mention the specific shapes of each letter. Learning letter names, sounds, and shapes is the first step to becoming a great reader. Many children start to learn to print at this age.

Learning to print helps children distinguish words from pictures and to understand that print carries meaning. However, learning to print is not intuitive. It may seem simple enough on the surface, but there are multiple skills involved: basic pencil-control skills as well as drawing vertical and horizontal lines, diagonal lines, and the dreaded curved and wavy lines.

When I first taught kindergarten a few years back, I wondered about the best way to teach my students to print. Should I start with the letter A? If so, should I start from the top and work down? Should I make the left diagonal line first?

For those of you that also struggle with such profound philosophical questions, I have included a few nifty videos that will answer them once and for all. They tackle letters down to their easiest and simplest form. You won't have to worry about confusing the lowercase L with the uppercase I after watching these videos. You don’t believe me? See for yourselves...

The New Learn to Read Pre-K Is Here

…and we couldn’t be more excited about it!

For a whole year we’ve been working on developing a Pre-K program that prepares children to learn to read in a fun and engaging way. The National Reading Panel study found that teaching alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness significantly improves children's reading success. Alphabetic knowledge is knowing the name of letters, the sounds they make, and their shapes and phonemic awareness is the ability to hear—and work with—the individual sounds in words. Rhyming is a big part of phonemic awareness:



Once children know the letters of the alphabet, the sounds they make, and have an understanding of how sounds relate to words, they’re ready to learn to read. Ultimately, this is what we set out to do with Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read Pre-K: prepare children to be great readers of great books—such as this one:



One of my favorite parts of creating Learn to Read Pre-K was developing our HOP kids with the talented illustrator, Bryan Lango. He created a cast of characters that really captures the spirit of our Pre-K program, kids having fun while learning. Pretty cute, no?



Research shows that young children learn through hands-on activities, and what they learn must be practiced over and over again. We designed the new Learn to Read Pre-K with this in mind, but more importantly, we wanted the activities to be meaningful and fun, fun, fun! Our learn-practice-play approach provides bite-sized skills children can master in one session. Each letter of the alphabet has its own lesson filled with great songs, fun animation,...and online games:



Learn to Read Pre-K is a bunch of fun activities that sneak in a lot of learning. Why focus so much on fun? Because children stay on task for longer periods of time when they are enjoying themselves, and this helps them make a lifelong association between learning and fun. Learning your ABCs was never so much fun! You don’t believe me? See for yourself…

Share and Share Alike . . .

Why shared reading?

Shared reading is an interactive reading experience in which children join in reading a story or book, guided by an experienced reader. What we want to accomplish with our shared reading animated stories is to mimic this activity as closely as possible. Traditionally, shared reading has been done in the classroom with big books; however, in the absence of a teacher, we used Visual Phonics™, animation, and actors to bring to life the same sounds and words that the kids learned in their Learn to Read workbooks. (Visual Phonics refers to our method of presenting phonics instruction through animated text.) Our shared reading animation highlights words in the stories so they can be seen—and read—clearly by children. We use stories from the workbooks to provide kids with the opportunity for repeated readings of predictable text and words.

The amusing stories and funny illustrations keep children interested and engaged but don’t distract them from focusing on the text. Our animated workbook stories also help kids practice sight word recognition, fluency, tracking text from left to right, and other important stuff. But most of all, the shared reading stories illustrate one of the main principles of the new Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read program: To use phonics as a tool to help children learn to read fun stories and encourage a lifelong love of reading. If you don’t believe me, see for yourselves. . . .

Full of Vitamin ABCDEFG!

"What does a good early literacy program look like?"

That’s the question we asked ourselves over and over while designing the new Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read Pre-K levels. Well, we knew it had to be all about phonemic awareness. That was the jump off point. What’s phonemic awareness? The ability to hear and manipulate phonemes—the smallest sounds we hear in words. We also knew it had to teach the alphabetic principle (associating sounds with their respective letters) and we knew it had to teach a few other skills we’ll talk about in future blogs (blending, alliteration, rhyming, etc.). But most of all, we were sure it had to be FUN. I constantly thought about those delicious chewable vitamins I used to take when I was a boy. I swear they tasted like candy, but they were good for me.
That’s what Learn to Read Pre-K had to be: fun that is good for you. It’s all about using animation, print, music, manipulatives, and online technology to help children build phonemic awareness (you already know what that means). And children have so much fun watching the HOP Kids hangin’ out doing fun things that they never notice they’re learning—a lot! If you don’t believe me see for yourselves…