Blending and segmenting are two crucial skills that are part of phonemic awareness, one of the building blocks of reading. Let’s review what exactly phonemic awareness is. Phonemic awareness occurs when a student understands that words are made up of individual sounds, and can manipulate those sounds. The term comes from the root word ‘phoneme,’ which is an individual unit of sound in a word. For example, the word ‘ship’ has four letters, but three phonemes, sh/i/p. When students are aware of the distinction between a word’s letters and its sounds, they have phonemic awareness.
Putting Sounds Together
So what are blending and segmenting and why are they so important? Blending is the ability to string together the phonemes (aka individual sounds) so they sound smooth and not choppy. It can take some students a long time to master the art of blending sounds. Many of these students have no trouble identifying individual phonemes in words and reading them one at a time. However, many are unable to put them together, or blend them, to produce the full word. For a student trying to read the word ‘ship,’ it might sound like this: “sh…i…p” instead of “ship.”
Taking Sounds Apart
While blending is a crucial skill for reading, segmenting is what a student must be able to do in order to spell words accurately or approximately. Segmenting is taking a word and splitting it up into its phonemes. If a student hears the word “ship” and is asked to segment it, she should be able to determine that the phonemes are sh/i/p, and she should eventually be able to spell/write it this way.
Even when students have mastered reading and blending phonemes, segmenting is different enough that some students struggle more with it. While they may know the digraph ‘sh’ very well and can read it in most contexts, they might hear it in the word ‘ship’ and mistake it for ‘ch,’ a similar-sounding digraph.
Another common segmenting mistake is for students to misidentify the vowel sound, especially when it is short, as in the ‘i’ in the word ‘ship.’ The most common mix-ups are with e/i and o/u/a, but some students mix up all five vowels with each other.
How to Help Students Blend and Segment
Students learn these strategies best by explicit instruction in both the terminology itself, modeling in how to execute the skill, and plenty of opportunities for practice. Students should know the word ‘blend’ and use it to describe what they are doing. It is often assumed that terms like this are “teacher-talk” only. This does not have to be the case! Students learn skills that they can name much faster than those they can’t.
Another great way to help students master these skills is by incorporating as many kinesthetic components as possible. Here are two great kinesthetic exercises that help students with blending and segmenting:
Tap it Out: Before students are even shown the letters in words, they can use their fingers or hands to practice tapping out individual phonemes. A popular method is to have students tap their thumb to a finger for each sound they hear. Let’s take the word ‘cat.’ Students would tap their thumb and forefinger as they make the ‘c’ sound. Then they would tap their thumb and middle finger as they make ‘a.’ Finally, they would tap their thumb and ring finger as they say ‘t.’ An alternative would be to use the fingers of one hand to tap on the opposite arm. After each phoneme gets a tap, students would blend the whole word by running their fingers down their arm in one smooth motion.
Mapping Words – Another strategy, or one students can use together with the strategy above, is to “map out” the word. Students can use chips or other counters for this, and use one counter to represent each phoneme. For the word ‘cat,’ the student would place one counter each inside of three boxes. Each counter would represent a phoneme in the word c/a/t. This is a great transition between aural awareness of the sounds in words and reading words.
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