Consonant Blend Capers!
Learning to read double blends is not easy, nor is learning
any reading. Learning to read is hard, it involves a lot of different processes
that the child has to master. It’s not just about recognising the shapes of
letters and translating them into sounds, it involves remembering which shapes
relate to which sound and then focusing on the page, tracking the word with
your eye. There are other complex
processes involved but I am sure that you get the picture and if any one of
these processes is not completed then reading fails. This is why I would rather
take a long time over concepts to achieve mastery or automaticity.
Automaticity is when you can look at a word and know what it
is without having to decode and it takes a lot of practise. As such when it
came to learning double blends with my youngest I knew that we would have to do
loads of supplemental activities in order to obtain that holy grail of reading
proficiency automaticity.
We are following the All about Reading Level 1 program but I
tweak it to fit our needs, hence the additional activities. I remember that I had to do this with my
oldest too and I used some of these activities with Zany but I wanted to
include more multi-sensory activities for her to help reinforce the sounds. To that
end I designed a set of activities that required her to get up and move around.
The first activity in the pack is a ‘Write the Room’
activity, to complete this task Zany had a worksheet on a clipboard and then
had to find a word from around the room and match it to the correct picture on
her sheet.
The second activity is a ‘Go Fetch’ activity, I placed the
words from the pack around the downstairs and then asked Zany to find specific words
and bring them to me. I made sure that there
are some words beginning with the same letter in order to force her to actually
read rather than search for the beginning sound. Yeah she is sharp and judging by the photo below needs her hair brushing!LOL
Finally I spread the words out on the table and asked her to
pass me specific words. To make this fun I said things like put the word ‘disk’
on my head, put the word ‘bunch’ under the table etc…
There are other ideas in the pack for fun ways to learn
consonant blends, you can get your free pack here:
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