The 5 P's of Phonemic Awareness
Phoneme Blending Activities & Worksheets
One absolute essential skill that children must develop to become a fluent reader is developing phonemic awareness - the ability to work and manipulate the smallest units of sound in English. For example the 3 sounds of /c/ /u/ /p/ blend together to say the word "cup". Pretty simple and straightforward - at least for someone who knows how to read phonetically; however, for young learners and children who cannot read yet, grasping on to this critical concept of blending can pose a lot of difficulties!
Here's a short video showing our 3.5 year old working on our blending worksheets:
The 5 P's are:
- phoneme blending
- phoneme segmenting
- phoneme addition and subtraction
- phoneme isolation and identification
- phoneme substitution
With that said, there are certain activities, games, and worksheets that you can engage your child with to help him/her quickly catch on to this important concept of blending sounds to say words. To that purpose, we've created a set of many different printable worksheets that you can use for all of the above mentioned 5P activities!
Phonemic Blending Worksheets
Below are our worksheets for practicing blends. Click on the thumbnail to download the PDF files. You will need Adobe Acrobat to view and print these.
Our worksheets come with instructions, but I'll just briefly explain how to work on these with your child.
The first worksheet actually has one example. The image shows a "jet", and below it, there are 2 rows of letters. Your goal is to help your child identify the sounds in "jet" which are /j/ /e/ /t/. Once your child figures out what the individual sounds are, he or she then must circle each of the sounds - just as shown in the example. Then your child should connect the sounds to say the full word. The final step is to write the complete word in the empty space provided.
This exercise provides a multifaceted workout for your child including:
- blending practice
- sounding out sounds
- helps with children's writing and spelling skills
Learning to blend is one of the first steps to learning to read, if you would like to learn more about an amazing program designed to teach children to read fluently, please click the link below:
