Segmenting Words and Blending Sounds

Being able to segment decodable words into their individual sounds (phonemes) is such an important reading skill. Help struggling readers practise their phonemic awareness with some interactive segmenting using these segmenting and blending mats! Here’s how:

1. Students choose one of the CVC words and place it on the decoding mat.
2. They decode the individual sounds within the word, tapping the sound icon (planet, lilypad or flower) as they vocalise each sound.
3. After students have segmented the word into individual sounds, they blend the sounds together.
4. They trace the arrow at the bottom of the decoding mat with their finger while saying the word.

Interactive Segmenting and Blending

Choose to implement this resource in your classroom in many ways.

• Attach the tokens (rockets, frogs or bees) to wooden pop sticks. Students use these as pointers when segmenting words and blending the sounds.
• Give students multiple tokens to cover each sound icon as they say the sound and practise their phoneme segmentation. Students blend sounds while using another token to trace the line at the bottom of the mat.
• Place the decoding mats in write and wipe sleeves. Write additional words for your students to practise blending and segmenting.

Teach Students Important Literacy Skills

Use these segmenting and blending mats during guided reading lessons and small group instruction. You could even set up the decoding mats as an independent workstation.

When working in small groups, track the progress of your students using the included tracking sheets.

1. Write the word they are segmenting and blending.
2. Tick the CVC or CVCC/CCVC circles to indicate if they have segmented the sounds correctly.
3. Record how they blended the sounds together.
4. Make any notes that you observe.

Each blending and segmenting mat design has two versions. One for CVC words and the other for CVCC/CCVC words. The resource also includes cards with CVC words and CVCC/CCVC words.

There are Colour and Black and White options available via the drop-down menu.