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5 year old, phonics, and blending


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My five year old daughter (birthday in Feb, so a young 5) and I have been working on phonics regularly since last August. She is very good at sounding out words with short vowel sounds and consonant blends. Consonant digraphs are still a bit shaky, but not too bad. I haven't introduced long vowel sounds yet.

 

She is awful at blending, though. If I were to tell her to read "The frog rests on the desk," she would be able to, but she would sound out do it as "f-r. fr-o-g. frog," and so on. There is usually about a one-second pause between letter sounds. Her ability to remember what she has just read seems to be about five or six words, tops.

 

Should I continue teaching new phonics skills or hold off until she is able to smoothly blend the sounds? (The difference between fr-o-g and fffrrroggg)?

 

We were using OPGTR, but she absolutely hated it. We're now using Progressive Phonics which she enjoys, and I also have Phonics Pathways (which I got in the mail today).

 

Any help or guidance you can offer is much appreciated!

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I'm no expert (I have one reading pretty well and one reading at about your daughter's stage), but I would keep moving forward with the phonics lessons. It sounds like what your daughter needs more than anything else is practice - she clearly understands all the concepts introduced so far. I would do lots and lots of review, but continue slowly adding new concepts. That way neither she nor you feel "stuck" and you open up additional, more interesting reading materials for her to practice on.

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Just keep practicing and try various methods and games. My 5 year old (he'll be 6 in a month) is finally blending. He would read frog as fog. He seemed to never see that second letter sound. After loads of practice and breaking the words into the parts he is finally starting to see the blend sound as one thing. He isn't even near understanding silent e. And even sight words have been tricky. He's a contrary child. I tell him the word is "of" and he'll argue that those are not the sounds o and f make. I just keep persevering. I feel like he can read better than he lets on, he just doesn't want to. So I give brief lessons each day. I'm sort of hating OPGTR too. I like ETC just fine. Going to read and study WRTR and possibly make a switch.

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We use OPGTR, but not exactly as written. When we did consonant digraphs, I made a "consonant blends bingo" game, putting all the blends on bottle caps. At first, the bingo cards had the consonant blends in each space. As we finished that section, I made new cards with whole words, and he had to match the digraph to a word containing it. A bit tedious to make all the cards, but it was fun and it really seemed to make all those blends sink in.

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We use OPGTR, but not exactly as written. When we did consonant digraphs, I made a "consonant blends bingo" game, putting all the blends on bottle caps. At first, the bingo cards had the consonant blends in each space. As we finished that section, I made new cards with whole words, and he had to match the digraph to a word containing it. A bit tedious to make all the cards, but it was fun and it really seemed to make all those blends sink in.

 

 

Yep. You could also do the same with cards or make a tic tac toe game. Hands-on games are about the only way my ds will do a phonics lesson with me anymore.

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I have 2 readers and one just below the level your dd is at. I teach spelling first. First we learn letter sounds and orally break words up into their separate sounds. Then we build words with a movable alphabet (spelling!). We also do some reading games at this level, but only work with words, not sentences or books. When we've done this for a while we move on to AAS, and both of my older kids jumped from slowly sounding out one word at a time as you described to reading a whole book about halfway through AAS level 1.

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Sometimes I think it's just the timing as well. She is still on the young side and probably just needs more time for it to "click" I know most people say more practice but some times taking a break for a bit and starting back up again might be helpful to. Every child is so different and some do well with constant practice while others struggle at that age. I'm no expert as I'm just teaching my first to read but that's what I did and it has really helped. The more we practiced the more she seemed to struggle then I took a couple of months off and all of a sudden on her own she started to point things out and remember things I didn't realize she knew! lol. Your dd actually sounds more ahead in reading skill then mine but I guess I'm in the camp of not pushing it too hard at this age. I'll be starting her up again in about a month - having a semester to mature has helped my dd tremendously. They are only 5 after all. :laugh: You're Mama though so you know your child best. Just thought I'd throw out another perspective.

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Sometimes I think it's just the timing as well. She is still on the young side and probably just needs more time for it to "click" I know most people say more practice but some times taking a break for a bit and starting back up again might be helpful to. Every child is so different and some do well with constant practice while others struggle at that age. I'm no expert as I'm just teaching my first to read but that's what I did and it has really helped. The more we practiced the more she seemed to struggle then I took a couple of months off and all of a sudden on her own she started to point things out and remember things I didn't realize she knew! lol.

 

I would agree with this based on my experience with my young reader. The speed with blending will just click one day most likely. In the mean time, you can continue on with phonics by teaching other concepts, like long vowels. Then when the fluency clicks in she'll have lots of tools in her toolbelt. It also would open up more reading material, which would help the interest level. Reading fun books is a great motivator. Also, remember that when practicing reading, they don't have to read a whole sentence/book. If you switch off and take turns, the book cranks along a little faster and might be more fun for the child. I found when I dropped the Bob-book level books and moved up to 2nd grade level readers where I was doing more of the reading (thus giving my child more of a break from performing, but she was still following along while I read and occasionally reading words on her level), her interest in reading was ignited. Within a month or so of doing this, her fluency ramped up and she wanted to read books on her level by herself. I think a mix is really good.

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There was a period of time when my daughter was sounding out words correctly but then blending them incorrectly, and I was astounded by how much patience it required from me (For example, she'd say st-i-ll, but after blending it would come out "skrivel"). And then all of a sudden one day, it just CLICKED. It was a beautiful moment. Either keep at it or take a break for a month or so and focus on simpler, 3 letter words.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

My middle son was at that stage for 2... long... years. :lol:

 

He did get past it!!!!! Most of the problem was that he just needed time and practice and developmental maturity. One thing that helped was doing Phonics Pathways. The way they teach blending caused both my 6 year old *and* my 3 year old to suddenly blend better (it happened in the same week, and they were in different spots of the book). The way they practice doing two letter blends so much (c-a ca ca-t cat) really cemented the blending process. It probably took maybe 6 weeks? But both kids had this noticeable "click" in one week, where they didn't have to sound everything out all the time. Both are very different learners, but Phonics Pathways has worked well for both, and they enjoy it. I just do 10 minutes a day, consistently. That's the limit of my 6 year old's attention span for phonics lessons. ;)

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  • 1 year later...
Guest readingwithintent

I would encourage you to keep working at it. Some kids do have more trouble with it than others, but that's no reason to go back any further. It's also handy to focus on two or more blends/digraphs at the one time. For example if your child is working with 'fr', also look at 'gr' or 'dr' words. Let them hear the difference. Say a word and let them tell you which digraph it is.

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I would move on with the phonics with plenty of practice at the more simple blending too - my younger child seemed stuck with some of the phonics and a few hands on games and just some time has had her speed ahead - reading is seldom linear so its fine to move on and review and keep coming back. It will get better. 

 

One game my younger child liked was to put words she could sound out in blocks on a page (about 12-16 words and sometimes digraphs alone - I just wrote them out on a scrap piece of paper each day) and then call out the word or phonetic combination and she put a block on it. When we had covered all the words and sounds then we would uncover them and she would have to tell me what to put blocks on which meant she had heard them all already when she came to blend them herself and also that she choose the ones first that she found easiest so I knew which were mastered and which still needed work.

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Just keep practicing and try various methods and games. My 5 year old (he'll be 6 in a month) is finally blending. He would read frog as fog. He seemed to never see that second letter sound. After loads of practice and breaking the words into the parts he is finally starting to see the blend sound as one thing. He isn't even near understanding silent e. And even sight words have been tricky. He's a contrary child. I tell him the word is "of" and he'll argue that those are not the sounds o and f make. I just keep persevering. I feel like he can read better than he lets on, he just doesn't want to. So I give brief lessons each day. I'm sort of hating OPGTR too. I like ETC just fine. Going to read and study WRTR and possibly make a switch.

My marked print UPP might help, here is the direct file and my sight word page where it sits with explanations why. It shows a u above the o and a v above the f.

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/Resources/sightwordsinUPP1.pdf

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/sightwords.html

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I highly recommend the free www.readingbear.org. It demonstrates the blending in several ways in word families.

Reading Bear is one of the first things I used with ds and it hasn't gotten him to fluency. I don't think it helped the choppy sounding out at all.

 

Interesting that this post is over a year old and we still are in the same place as then. He has no fluency. He was young then but I always felt it was more than that.

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