About this activity
Sixteen words with two-consonant blends at the start: black, blue, block and blanket for bl; crab, cry, crown and cricket for cr; star, stop, stick and stamp for st; tree, train, truck and tractor for tr. A blend is two sounds the child usually has separately, and the difficulty is producing them without a vowel appearing between them.
How to use it in a session
Watch for the inserted vowel and name it. Buh-lack is the characteristic error, and asking the child to say the two consonants closer together works better than asking them to say the word again. Contrast the blend with its parts — bl against b and l — so the child hears what is being asked. Ten minutes covers the sixteen with the contrast step on the ones that break.
What to listen for
Listen for reduction as well as insertion. A child who says back for black has dropped the second consonant entirely, which is a different pattern from buh-lack and needs different work: reduction usually resolves by adding the missing sound slowly, insertion by speeding the two up. Watch tr specifically — tree and truck are often produced with a /ch/ quality, which is a normal feature of English rather than an error.
Carrying it home
Blend words are easy to notice on a walk: tree, truck, star, stop sign. Asking a child to say the word rather than correcting how they said it keeps the practice from turning into a correction routine.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- First and second, where blends are both a phonics and a speech target.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all sixteen words play with no login.
- My child says 'buh-lue' for 'blue'. What is that?
- Vowel insertion — the two consonants are being separated by a schwa. It usually resolves by cueing the child to run the two sounds together quickly rather than by more repetitions of the whole word.