Let’s Blend S-Blend Words!

Blending plays a vital role in literacy development because it enables students to merge individual speech sounds into complete words. This skill is crucial for learners as it facilitates the process of decoding unfamiliar words by recognizing and applying letter-sound patterns during reading. Through blending, students can effectively bridge the gap between recognizing individual letters and understanding the corresponding sounds they represent.

This set of initial r-blend word flashcards has been created by a teacher for students to practice blending r-blends at the start of different words. By practicing blending similar initial sounds (such as initial r-blend words), learners sharpen their ability to discern subtle differences in speech sounds, enabling them to identify and manipulate individual sounds within words. This skill facilitates the recognition of common sound patterns and word families, empowering students to decode unfamiliar words more effectively by applying their knowledge of sound-letter correspondence.

The following s-blends are included in this set of blending flashcards:

• sl as in slip
• sw as in swan
• sm as in smell
• sk as in skip
• sc as in scan
• st as in stop
• sn as in snip
• sp as in spot

Three-letter Blends

Three-letter consonant blends have three consonants with no vowels separating them. Students learn that they say the sound of each letter when they pronounce these letter combinations, just like with 2-consonant blends. but we’ve included some common three-letter s blends in this pack for students to practice blending.

• scr as in scrub
• spr as in sprint
• spl as in split
• str as in strong
• squ as in squat

How to Teach Blending

There has been much debate of the teaching of blends and how it’s a cognitive overload for young children to teach every single blend separately. This is true, however learning to blend, as we know, is an important skill. Many teachers are still teaching blends as they see the benefit in it, however they tend to categorize them into four distinct groups:

1. s blends
2. l blends
3. r blends
4. End blends

So, rather than spreading instruction over an entire year, they tackle each category within a focused time frame. Therefore, you may dedicate a week to teaching all the s blends. To ensure your students are understanding how to blend, decode and encode accurately, explicit modeling and practice is key!

One activity you could use with these flash cards are sound boxes. They offer an effective method to reinforce blending. If one of the words featured in these task cards has a ‘tricky’ digraph or one your students haven’t learnt yet – you can write this in the sound box for them so they are only focusing on practicing familiar sounds.

Download and Blend Today!

Use the drop down menu to choose between the color or black and white versions, as well as the editable Google Slides or easy to print PDF version of each set.

More S-Blending Resources

Looking for more r-blend resources to use to consolidate your students blending of r-blends? We have you covered…

teaching resource

Google Interactive Initial S-Blends Activity

Decode and segment words by identifying the s-blend words with phonemes sp, sl, sm, sn, sc, st.

teaching resource

Google Interactive S-Blends Activity

Help your readers practice their S-blend skills with fun, interactive Google Slides word-building activities.

teaching resource

S-Blends Word List

Introduce and explore words containing an initial s-blend using an s-blends word list.