Considerations for Instruction of Consonant Blends

Before we decide to take up valuable instruction time to teach a skill or concept, it is critical to gauge its value. WHY am I teaching this and HOW will my students benefit from this? Today I’m discussing whether or not there is value in teaching consonant blends.

Is teaching blends necessary?

One school of thought is NO, it’s not. If you are teaching explicit phonics, and your students can segment and blend the phonemes in a word with automaticity when they look at the graphemes, they are already blending regardless of how those graphemes are classified. They do not need to know that, for example, the letters s + l are a blend in order to successfully sound out the words slime or slow. Makes sense, right?

And I agree.

HOWEVER, there are two reasons why explicit instruction of consonant blends (initial and final) do carry value. 

The first consideration:

The first benefit of teaching blends is for those struggling spellers who may spell a word like stand as sdand. In other words, students who write what they hear themselves sound out, even when our language never spells those letters next to each other. Other examples of similar spelling mistakes are:

jraw for draw

chrain for train

In this case, explicit instruction of blends can help prevent these types of spelling errors when students learn that certain letter combinations simply never go together.

The second consideration:

Another time to consider explicit instruction of blends is to support knowledge of accurate syllable division. For example, VCCCV (vowel-consonant-consonant-consonant-vowel) words like monster, conflict, and pumpkin all require division somewhere among the consonants. Having knowledge of blends that stay together helps immensely in understanding where the division will occur. 

So, is teaching blends absolutely necessary?

When it comes down to it, what’s the verdict? If students have the fluent ability to blend the phonemes represented by the graphemes in front of them to read words, have no spelling deficits, and can effortless divide VCCCV words properly, they will not require much instructional time spent on blends, and may just benefit from a quick reinforcement. Conversely, if students are struggling with spelling and syllable division, time spend on blends will be warranted. As always, explicit instruction is crucial.

Types of Consonant Blends

L-blends: bl, cl, fl, gl, pl, sl

R-blends: br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, tr,

S-blends: sc, sk, (sl), sm, sn, sp, st, sw

Final blends: ct, ft, ld, lf, lk, lp, lt, mp, nd, nk, nt, pt, rd, rk, sk, sp, st, xt

3-letter blends: scr, shr, spl, spr, squ, str, thr, nch

Other blends: dw, tw

I hope this information helps to drive meaningful instruction and sorts out any questions you may have had about the shoulds or ifs of consonant blends instruction.

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Supporting Upper Elementary Readers

I’ll never forget what a colleague of mine told me in my early days of teaching: “Once the kids get to third grade, there isn’t a way to help them figure out a word. You just have to tell them what it is, and then they’ll memorize it.” 🙄

I know, I know. 

This didn’t sit well with me, but I had no authority and little experience with this grade level at the time. What I did, however, was my own detective work to uncover the truth, and to help those students out.

You cannot tell me that once a child is in third grade reading instruction ends, and that there is no way to support these readers to read the longer, multisyllabic words in their chapter books and content texts across curricula.

So what did I do? I watched and listened. I observed the types of words that were stumping these readers. 

Here is what I discovered about most of them:

  • With some of the words, students could have used knowledge of advanced phoneme-grapheme relationships to blend and sound out words. They could have tried different sounds made by the same letter. For example, EA and CH each make three different and unique sounds. 

  •  If students had been provided explicit instruction on syllable types, they could have identified where the division occurs in each word and divide the word into manageable syllables. 

  • They could have isolated the root, base, and affixes, thereby also making the word more manageable to decode. 

10+ years later and I still cringe when I think about that comment, and at the thought of this idea (or rather, lie) being perpetuated — that reading instruction at the intermediate and upper elementary level comes to a halt because the words “can’t be sounded out” like readers are taught to do in K-2.

As students get older and have more advanced texts in their hands, we must move with them and guide them and give them more advanced strategies. It’s no coincidence that this is also the age when students, who once liked to read, avoid it. There is an absence of explicit strategies to support them. It’s now hard. It’s frustrating. It’s no longer enjoyable. 

Decoding text is just one component of the ability to be a proficient reader. We need comprehension as well. However, if students cannot master decoding fluently, they will not be able to work on comprehending efficiently. With explicit instruction in advanced phonemic and phonological awareness, syllable division, and morphology, we can help bridge that instructional gap and provide students with what they need to guide them towards becoming competent and confident readers who actually want to read once they cross the bridge from the lower elementary grades to the upper elementary grades. One best practice at a time, and we CAN appropriately support and motivate these transitional readers.