CVC Blending holds the key to early readers. When students can blend the letters and sounds to make a word so many doors are opened in reading. However, blending sounds takes practice.

CVC Blending: Choppy Seas

Students start blending with very choppy sound retrieval. You know EXACTLY what I mean.  

The students come to a word they don’t know and they are like choppy seas, chopping at each letter sound.

/c/     /a/    /t/

The sounds are separated and disconnected.  

When they do this, they often think the word starts with the t sound because that’s the last sound they hear.  They have a hard time hearing the combined sounds when the sounds are separated.

Don’t let them chop their sounds, like choppy seas.

CVC Blending: Smooth Sailing

We have to teach them to be smooth operators and turn the choppy seas in to smooth sailing.  Instead of “sound it out,” we have to teach our students to “slide and sound.”  You see, “sound it out” is exactly what they are doing when they chop at the sounds.  They are reproducing individual and separated sounds.  They need practice blending the sounds…not making the sounds.

I had seen similar cards on various sites and decided to try them.  I put the CVC word on the front with an arrow to show they should be sliding their sounds and dots to designate when they make the sound for the next letter.  They should slide it slowly, slide it quickly, and then turn it over to confirm their word.

The first video shows the sweetest kid in the whole world using the CVC sliders.  He had used the cvc sliders for a few days before this video.  We had practiced with short o words (in my opinion, they seem to be the easiest to decode).  Today I gave him a few other words.  He as so excited.  THEN, this happened.

Yep, the picture on the back didn’t match the card. OOPS.  Here’s one last video, just because I can’t refuse it.

Yes, two of the videos are facing one way and one is facing the other.  I’ll get better.

CVC Passages

Finally, we need to create a space and a time to have students practice reading words in passages.

Reading words in isolation can not only be much more difficult, but it can also lack comprehension and word understanding.

Adding a passage can help with both.

Adding multiple words for one family can also help students with phoneme manipulation!

For additional interventions ideas, check out my Pinterest board below.

Follow Cathy Collier’s The W.I.S.E Owl’s board Interventions on Pinterest.

If you’d like a FREEBIE Sample of Cards and a Passage, click the link or the picture below.

If you’d like the full set, Decoding Strategies: Stretch and Blend.