How do blending and segmenting games help students?
With blending and segmentation strategy, students can develop better knowledge in reading and spelling.
It is a long process which will help the students to get involved with the process.
However, it is recommended to start with blending and segmenting syllables.
If students are taught the skill of segmentation, it will help them to acquire successful reading development.
In simple terms blending means combining sounds, and segmenting refers to separate sounds.
This skill is required for students to adopt quick learning and reading capabilities.
Developing phonological awareness is an important stage of developing a reader within them.
If they are confident about phonetics, they will be able to read more skillfully than any other student.
The entire process takes a few steps to acquire the outcome.
The steps are the following:
1. Hearing oral rhymes and alliteration
2. Hearing words in spoken sentences
3 .Hearing syllables in spoken words
4. Hearing onsets and rhymes in words
5. Hearing individual phonemes in words
Let’s understand with a proper example:
a. Blending
There are various strategy to start with blending activities, for example:
- Guess the word game
- Robot talk
- Blending slide
- Oral blending activity
- Sound blending songs
Now let us understand the game thoroughly.
b. Guess the word game
Through this game, students will be able to blend and identify a word that is explained in the component sounds.
You need some picture cards with common objects like: snake, cup, sun, plane, bell, etc.
You need to place a small number of picture cards before the students.
You will have to spell the name of the objects present in the cards through ‘snail talk’ (slow way of narrating a word like: snaaaaaake); students have to look at the pictures and guess the particular word you are saying.
You can segment the students among the group and give them at least one chance to tell the answer.
This way, you can encourage the students to stay engaged throughout the class.
c. Segmenting
Segmenting is an activity of phonological awareness to teach the students proper phonetics.
Children can easily manipulate their oral language.
You can start with segmenting their own names into syllables, like: Abhi-sekh, su-nana, etc.
Apart from their names, you can start mentoring them with individual phones like:
S-u-n, c-a-t, s-t-o-p.
Like blending, segmenting can also be taught with different gaming activities. Take a look at such activities:
- Segmenting cheer activity
- Segmenting with puppets
Let's understand one of these activities with an example:
d. Segmenting cheer activity
For this activity, teachers need to start with three phonemes words like: ten, cat, dog, read, and soap.
Cheer one of these three phonemes words, for example, cat! Cat! Cat!
Ask the students if they can segment the word cat.
And ask them the beginning of the sound (students should answer C)
Ask them the middle sound. (The students should answer A)
Ask them the ending sound (the students should answer T)
C – A – T is the right answer.
