5 Great Phoneme Blending and Segmenting Activities to Help with Future Reading
Here are some great ways to engage children with learning to blend and segment phonemes, major skills of phonemic awareness that help with spelling and build reading fluency.
These fun and interactive exercises are designed to boost phonemic awareness, which is a key predictor of reading success. By sharpening children’s listening skills and identifying individual sounds in words, known as phonemes, children can develop the foundational skills they need to become confident readers. Blending and segmenting go hand in hand, creating a powerful combination that can help your child master phonics and conquer new words with greater ease.
Blending
Blending is where the phonemes of a word get merged together to create a pronounceable word. For example, blending the sounds /b/ /a/ /t/ to form the word ‘bat’. This skill is crucial when it comes to reading.
Segmenting
Segmenting is the reverse of blending. It is when a word gets broken apart into its separate phonemes. For example, segmenting the word ‘car’ into its individual phoneme sounds /c/ /a/ /t/. It is key in learning to spell.
Activities focused on aiding children with developing their phoneme blending and segmenting skills don’t need to be elaborative or lengthy. In fact, for most young children, incorporating blending and segmenting skill practice for a few minutes as part of a regular routine when reading, is all that is needed to help create the foundation for these skills.
5 Phoneme Blending and Segmenting Activities
Blending and segmenting activities can be done through fun games using engaging visual aids and manipulatives. They can also be incorporated into reading and writing activities.
It helps to set up your expectations at the very beginning for how your child or student should engage with the materials and the consequences of using them inappropriately.
Most importantly, we want to create a positive learning experience and set a tone of enthusiasm and encouragement, making these activities enjoyable to do.
Activity One – A Visual Phoneme and Segmenting Excercise
When it comes to phoneme blending and segmenting activities, using a visual aid is helpful.
Simply give your child or student something that can be stretched out and then put back together, anything from elastic bands, silly putty, to Hoberman spheres, silicone push pop fidgets, and my personal favourite, fidget pop tubes.
Start by picking a simple three-letter consonant-letter-consonant (CVC) word, like ‘map’ for example (even better if all phonemes in this word are continuous sounds, for example, van).
It’s easier to start with continuous phoneme sounds first as we can elongate them when we segment them without distorting the proper sound. Our blog post about phoneme isolation, blending, and segmenting can help you learn about continuous sounds versus stop sounds and how to know if you are saying and teaching them correctly.
Next, give your child a visual aid. This should be something that can be stretched out and put back together easily. Your child or student’s job is to expand the object slightly with each sound they hear in the word (as the word is segmented into its individual phoneme sounds).
Next, blend the sounds back together to say the word naturally. As the sounds are blended together, your child or student can put (or smoosh) the item back together.
A visual aid helps build your child or student’s concept of words being stretched out into their individual phoneme sounds and blended back together to pronounce a recognizable word.
While visual tools can be useful for blending and segmenting tasks, they are not necessary. Children can simply use their bodies, such as moving their hands apart from each other as they say the individual sounds in a word and then bringing them together again as they blend the sounds back together to say the word naturally.
Another way is to have your child or student start with their feet together and move one foot away from the other foot as they say each individual sound in a word. Then when they need to blend the sounds, he/she can shift their weight and slide the grounded foot back up to touch the other one as they say they blend the phonemic sounds of the word back together.
Activity Two – Using Elkonin Boxes for Phoneme Counting
Elkonin boxes, also known as sound boxes or phoneme boxes, are a visual tool used to help children develop their phonemic awareness skills. The boxes are named after their creator, psychologist and educator Dr. Dmitry El’konin.
Steps for How to Use Elkonin Boxes:
Elkonin boxes consist of a series of empty squares, usually between three and six, that represent the sounds or phonemes in a word. Children listen to a word spoken aloud and then place a token in each box to represent each single sound they hear.
- Choose a word to use with the Elkonin boxes. It’s best to start with short, simple words that only have three or four sounds, such as ‘lip’, ‘box’, or ‘hat’. These examples are also words that have single-letter-sound correspondence, which means they have the same number of letters as they do sounds. It’s best to start with single-letter-sound correspondence words before moving on to words such as ‘sheep’, which has five letters but only three sounds: /sh/ /ee/ /p/.
- Draw the appropriate number of boxes for the word you’ve chosen. If you’re using the word ‘run’ for example, you would draw three boxes.
- Say the word out loud and have your learner listen carefully to the sounds in the word. Encourage your learner to repeat the word back to you.
- Next, have your learner place a token or some type of manipulative in each box to represent each sound they hear in the word. For example, for the word ‘cat’, your child would place a token in the first box for the /k/ sound, another token in the second box for the /a/ sound, and a third token in the third box for the /t/ sound.
- Once your child has segmented that phoneme sounds in the word by placing the tokens in the Elkonin boxes, have your child say the word again and point to each token and say each sound. This helps reinforce the connection between the visual representation in the boxes and the sounds in the word.
- You can also use Elkonin boxes to practice other phonemic awareness skills, such as phoneme blending and substitution. For example, you could use Elkonin boxes to help your child or student blend the sounds in the word “cat” together to form the word “hat,” or to substitute the first sound in “cat” with a different sound to make a new word or a nonsense word.
Turn Counting Phonemes into An EnLIGHTening Phoneme Segmenting Experience
Other excellent visual aids, perfect for segmenting activities, are light-up toys and tools that turn on by touching them or pressing them down, like puck lights.
To change things up, use light-up gadgets in place of Elkonin boxes, simply say a word and ask your child or student to tap on the puck light, turning each one on one-by-one, for each new sound he/she hears. In the beginning, start with common and easy CVC words.
Next, have your child say each sound in the word as they tap on the puck light again, this time turning it turn it off. It is best to follow the order of reading, which is left to right.
This is a fun activity to do in a darkened room or sensory room. Children can even do this activity in the bathroom with these fun dinosaur light-up bath toys!
Activity Three – Phoneme Sound Race
Race your child or student to the end, using a phoneme sound race board game by simply using numbers 2-5.
Once children have gotten the hang of blending and segmenting, they can be introduced to longer phoneme sound words. An activity, like this phoneme sound race, is a fun and interactive way to keep children practicing these skills as they progress in their language development.
Players can either segment or blend words – you can change it up each time you play or mix it up for each game. To get from start to finish, players move around the board game by moving their marker to the next number representing the number of sounds (phonemes) in a word.
You will need a stack of picture cards that have words having a range between two to five phoneme sounds.
The first person to get from start to end is the winner.
Activity Four – Snail Talking
Another way to help children with blending and segmenting is to use the ‘snail talk’ method.
Snail talking is when individual attention is given to each sound and any continuous sounds are slightly elongated to help children hear the different phonemic sounds within a word.
You can let your child or student know you are going to say words slowly, the way snails are so slow to move across the ground, and that it is his/her job to guess which word you are saying.
Then ‘snail talk’ out an easy CVC word (being mindful to say phoneme stop sounds without an added the schwa /uh/ sound at the end) and see if your child can figure out the word. By listening to each of the sounds separately and having to guess the word, they are actually needing to blend these sounds together mentally.
Start with words with three sounds, doing 6-10 words max in one session. Once your child or student has got the hang of it, you can challenge them by using words with an increasing amount of sounds. You want to keep the ratio on the side of them getting the majority of them correct each time you add in a challenge and keep motivation at centerstage when doing activities like these.
The Dynamic Duo
Help your little learner by using visual aids to discern the beginning, middle, or end sounds in words. Simple draw out boxes, and use manipulatives, in the style of Elkonin boxes.
Want to get more creative – click to discover lots of great ideas for tools for phonemic awareness tasks to keep your little learner enthusiastically engaged!
Phonemic awareness forms the foundation of literacy, and it’s okay if some children need more time to grasp it. Tailor your activities to your child or student’s developmental level and progress gradually as their skills improve. Remember, small steps count! There is a lot of joy and power through positive reinforcement by celebrating small achievements along the way.
Activity Five- Robot Talking
Robot talking is in a similar line to the ‘snail talk’ method but continuous phoneme sounds are not drawn out. Instead, short pauses are used to separate each sound making the speaker sound like an old-style robot.
The ‘robot talk’ method can be used in the same way as ‘snail talk’, where your child or student needs to determine which word is being spoken.
‘Robot talking’ is also great for reversing the order, by saying the word naturally (in its blended state) and then having your child or student segment each sound he or she hears, getting them to talk like an old-style robot. This video provides an example and shows how it can be tied into a writing activity.
Make Snail Talk and Robot Talk Activities Tactile Experiences
Here are a couple of ideas to make ‘snail talk’ and ‘robot talk’ activities more engaging or to help stimulate other senses which can enhance learning and make for a more tactile experience.
Mystery Bag or Box: pick a few items and toys that are short simple words to pronounce and put them into a bag or box, even better if they are CVC words like pan, hat, bat, cat, pig, hen, gum, etc.
Next, have your child reach into the bag or box without looking and pull out an item and say what the object is. Together go through the sounds of the word, either segmenting at the onset-rime level or phoneme level. Then say the word again in its blended state.
This can be done for all the items in the bag or box. If your child is very young, there is no need to push through all the items, just do a few and move on to something else. You can bring out the bag again on a different day and do a few more.
This is a great language-building activity to do while reading books together.
Search-and-Find Sensory Bins: This is another fun way to make ‘snail talk’ and ‘robot talk’ phoneme blending and segmenting activities more engaging.
Hide items and toys in rice, beans, shredded paper, Jell-o, coloured noodles, sand, or anything that would make for great sensory exploration and that you’re comfortable with your child or student exploring safely (young children should always be supervised during this type of activity and other activities involving small pieces).
Now comes the fun part for your child, where he/ she gets to try to find hidden objects. Each time an item gets found, say the name of the object, segmenting the word into its respective onset and rime components or phoneme sounds. Then blend the sounds back together again to pronounce the word naturally one more time.
For children in kindergarten and depending on where they are at with their phonemic awareness, you can ask your child to segment the sounds themselves and provide guidance as needed.
Sensory Bin Matching: For an added bonus, you can combine the sensory bin search-and-find activity described above with a matching activity.
All you need to do is to create pictures of the items in the sensory pin or have duplicates of each item and lay them out.
Your child can search for the matches to each item by digging around in the sensory bin. Have your child lay down the item from the sensory bin by the picture or item that matches. Ask your child or student to say what the item is. Then say the word for your child, breaking the sounds in the word apart (again, segmenting either at the onset-rime level or phoneme level).
Lastly, say the word in its blended form again.
Eye-spy Activities and Books: Other eye-spy activities and books are perfect for finding simple words where you can bring your child’s attention to the different sounds that make up the word as he/she is excitedly hunting for the item.
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Hi, I’m Julie, the passionate creator of Ox & Owl Literacy. I enjoy empowering families and educators with wonderful resources to inspire fun, imaginative, and joyful learning opportunities for young kiddos. You’ll find lots of recommended books, reading resources, and creative learning activities on this site aiming to help children fall in love with language, books, reading, and the transformational power of stories.
