About this activity
Eighteen words sorted into six /r/ blends: bread, bridge and brush for br; crab, crown and cry for cr; drum, dream and drive for dr; frog, fruit and frown for fr; grass, grape and green for gr; train, tree and truck for tr. Six blends is a wide sample, and the sorting forces the student to attend to the consonant before the /r/ rather than to the /r/ alone.
How to use it in a session
Say both consonants slowly and then run them together. The cluster is where /r/ is often preserved even when the singleton is not, because the preceding consonant does some of the tongue's positioning work — which means the blends can be a way into /r/ rather than a step after it. Do three blends at a time rather than six. Ten minutes covers a subset properly.
What to listen for
Listen for the /r/ becoming a /w/ inside the cluster. Bwead for bread is the characteristic error and it is the same substitution that appears on the singleton. Watch tr and dr, which in ordinary English are produced with a slight /ch/ and /j/ quality — that is a normal feature rather than an error, and it is worth knowing before correcting it.
Carrying it home
Blend words are easy to spot: bread, tree, truck, grass, green. Asking a child to say the word rather than correcting how they said it keeps this from becoming a correction routine.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Second through fifth, for students working on /r/ in clusters.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all eighteen words play with no login.
- Should I work on blends before or after singleton /r/?
- Sometimes before. The consonant in front helps position the tongue, so many students produce a correct /r/ in a cluster before they can produce it alone — which makes the blends a useful way in.