The Phonemic Awareness Solution for Blending

Literacy Success Starts With The Phonemic Awareness Solution

Finally, an instructional program for students with dyslexia and learning differences!

How would you like to supercharge your literacy instruction, boosting your students’ reading and spelling skills? After decades of investigation, research has revealed the secret to early reading success: phonemic awareness instruction.1

The National Reading Panel Has Concluded That Phonemic Awareness Instruction -Boosts children's ability to read and comprehend -Improves children's spelling -Gets measurable results faster. (BayTreeBlog.com)

But here’s the problem. Many reading programs aren’t designed for struggling learners. They aren’t created for the 20% of kids who don’t develop phonemic awareness unless they’re taught explicitly.

The Phonemic Awareness Solution gives you the tools you need to teach blending, an essential phonemic awareness skill. It’s designed to engage all types of learners, especially those with dyslexia, ADHD, learning differences, and language-based learning disabilities. It’s chock-full of kid-friendly activities that accelerate literacy achievement.

We put the best tools at your fingertips. Engaging activities and games, all based on the latest research. Plus, lively practice activities, built-in progress monitoring, visual scaffolds, and more. You’ll be able to teach the essential phonemic awareness skill with our program.

 
 

Why Should I Teach Phonemic Awareness?

If you knew there was a cheap and easy way to boost reading and spelling skills for all children, would you be interested?

Of course! That’s why so many educators are fired up about phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness instruction, when added to a reading program, gives kids the foundational skills for successful decoding and spelling.

After reviewing over 100,000 literacy research studies, The National Reading Panel concluded:

"If children are to benefit from phonics instruction, they need phonemic awareness." (BayTreeBlog.com)

How does phonemic awareness work?

When kids learn to read, they discover that a single word is made up of individual letters. In turn, those letters represent sounds. In order to read, kids must:

  • Know that words are made up of sounds.
  • Hear the sounds in words.
  • Understand how to work with these sounds.
  • Pronounce individual sounds and blend them together to make a word.

How does phonemic awareness help kids read?

It's SO fun kids don't even know they're learning phonemic awareness! (BayTreeBlog.com)

Imagine that you’re about to read the word bath.

In order to pronounce this word, first you must discover that the letter “b” represents the sound /b/, the letter “a” represents the sound /a/, and the final letters “th” represents the sound /th/.

Secondly, you must sequentially blend these sounds together to say “bath.”

You can do all of this because you have phonemic awareness skills. Without the ability to blend sounds together, kids are limited to guessing or recalling text by rote when they encounter wonderful, new words in their books.

When kids can decode well, reading comprehension improves. Why?

When kids read words easily and accurately, they can focus on the meaning of what they’re reading, not the mechanics of sounding out.

How does phonemic awareness help kids spell?

Spelling requires even more complex phonemic awareness skills. In order to spell the word “camp,” you have to pull apart the individual sounds /c/ /a/ /m/ /p/. This skill is called segmenting. Kids who have phonemic awareness know that there is a predictable relationship between sounds and letters. This helps them become stronger spellers.

Why Does This Program Work So Well?

If you teach exceptional students, The Phonemic Awareness Solution is for you. It’s all in here:

  • Focus on essential skills. The Phonemic Awareness Solution focuses solely on blending — the skill children must master to sound out new words. Research has demonstrated that it’s counterproductive to teach too many phonemic awareness skills. Instead, children seem to do best when instruction targets the must-have skills — blending and segmenting. By targeting your instruction on the right skills, your students progress faster.
  • Plenty of practice. Unlike other programs, the Phonemic Awareness Solution gives you multiple exercises for each key skill. We know that kids with learning disabilities achieve mastery when they’re given enough time to practice. With 10 practice exercises for each game and 61 pages of practice activities, we’ve got you covered. Aren’t you tired of creating extra practice worksheets?
  • Different levels for different students. Pass your students’ “Goldilocks test” by giving them activities that aren’t too easy and aren’t too hard. We offer you five different levels of difficulty, so your students are working at the level that is appropriate for them. Build confidence and save time!
Program levels include continuous and stop sounds, so you can differentiate. (BayTreeBlog.com)
  • Built-in scaffolds. Let’s be honest. Kids with learning disabilities often need additional supports to succeed. We use everyday vocabulary, easy-to-understand images, and fun visual aids so that you can reach students with executive function weaknesses, working memory deficits, and lower attention skills.
  • Time-tested methods. We use a distributed model of teaching. Instead of teaching all at once, teaching is spaced. This practice model has been demonstrated to be effective for more than 100 years!2 Using this technique, you can actually reduce the total reading instruction time required.
  • The blending board is a vital scaffold.  Spot cognitive overload students with working memory challenges. (BayTreeBlog.com)Accommodations for working memory challenges. Often, children with phonemic awareness challenges have impacted working memories. Our program is scaffolded so your students don’t get overwhelmed. We commissioned a local San Francisco artist to create this fun blending board to help students manage the working memory demands of blending. No more tired, glossy-eyed students!
  • Attention grabbers. Your instruction stays fresh and lively with 5 different practice activities. And you’ll captivate your students with the two lighthearted games included in our program.
 
 

What’s Included?

This 64-page PDF includes 5 core activities:

  • The instructor says three sounds, and the child points to the matching image. (BayTreeBlog.com)Blend and Point is the perfect activity for kindergarteners, first graders, or less-able readers. You’ll receive ten practice levels, each with kid-friendly CVC words and corresponding images. Set your goals, print, and you’ll be ready to start in 5 minutes. No prep required!
  • Blend and Say brings kids’ blending skills to the next level. The instructor says three sounds and asks the child “What word do these sounds make?”
  • Blend and Read links phonemic awareness skills with real reading. Kids will be ready to use this strategy with hundreds of new words! (BayTreeBlog.com)Blend and Read is the most challenging activity, since it requires kids to coordinate their phonemic awareness skills with phonics. Use a toy car to race along and read new words. We’ve heard from many teachers who say this is the perfect warm-up activity for beginning readers. Spend 5 minutes with a student at the beginning of a session.
  • The Guessing Game. Drop a few CVC image cards into a “magic” bag. Dramatically, select one card. Say the word sound-by-sound. Can the student guess the word?
  • Kids Agree: Bingo is fun! (BayTreeBlog.com)Blending BINGO. What could be more fun than BINGO? Say words sound-by-sound and let students blend the phonemes into words. Then students find the matching image on their bingo boards! Ideal for fun, take-home practice or an end-of-session reward.

This Program Will Save You Time

We know you’re busy. That’s why this entire program can be learned in minutes and taught in just a few hours. Re-print and use with all your students!

  • Just download and print. No more time-intensive prep.
  • Just the tools you need in easy reach. No long training videos. No weekend workshops.
  • Detailed teacher instructions allow paraprofessionals or parents to provide effective instruction.
  • Built-in progress-monitoring. Each activity includes customizable goal templates, perfect for IEPs.
  • Best of all, the educational benefits are long-lasting. Prepare to change young lives using effective educational techniques.

Get Started Now

We invite you to click on the button below to add the Phonemic Awareness Solution for Blending to the shopping card on your right. →

We Guarantee Your Complete Satisfaction.

Our guarantee! (BayTreeBlog.com)

We back all of our programs with a satisfaction guarantee. Not delighted? Let us know within 90 days, and you get your money back! You have our promise.

Research References

1 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

2 Melton, A. W. (1970). The situation with respect to the spacing of repetitions and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5 (9), 596-606.