Blending Board Reminders

Estimated reading: 2 minutes

The Blending portion of the Three-Part Drill can be used in a variety of ways. Here are some of our favorite variations:

Human Blending Board: You can do a gross motor activity with your students. Have students hold the initial consonant pile, the medial (vowel) pile, and the final consonant pile. Have other students blend the words. Students hold up their letter when students are segmenting sounds. Then all students hold their letter up when blending the word. You can also have a student come in to add the Magic E or -ed.
Rhyming Word Families: Another variation is to only change the initial consonant pile. This will help with rhyming words and word families.
Short vowels: When working on short vowels, only change the vowel card and keep the beginning and ending consonant piles the same.
Initial consonant pile: You can also just remove the initial consonant pile if students struggle with blending CVC words, try removing the initial consonant to modify to a VC blending versus whole words/syllables.
Blending Board Notebook: Bend a three-ring binder inside out. Attach index cards with letters to each of the rings to have a beginning, medial, and final letter piles. Students can flip cards and blend words together in centers.
Gross Motor Tap-A-Long: To get your students more involved, have them tap and blend on their desks as you tap and blend on the blending board. You can also use a rubber band to stretch across the blending board to represent blending words.

Let your instructors know if you have another creative way to use your blending board! We would love to know!