Blend the Sounds: Read the Boxes, Circle the Picture

The boxes are already filled on this 1st grade blend-the-sounds page — the child reads instead of writes. Six rows carry a word from the toys theme printed one sound per dashed box at the left (on this sheet g-ir-l, l-e-g-o, sh-o-v-e-l, b-a-ll, d-o-ll, b-u-ck-e-t, with a curve under each two-letter box) and three small pictures at the right, one of which matches. The child says the sounds in order, blends them into the word, and circles the picture that names it: the ball rather than the truck or the kite, the bucket rather than the rocket or the sandbox. Words run from three to five sounds, with at most one wide box each.

This is the base sound boxes page run backward, and the reversal is what it teaches. Segmenting is hearing the sounds in a word; blending is pushing printed sounds back together into one, and children who can do one are not always able to do the other. Two of the three pictures share the theme with the answer but not its sounds, so the choice cannot be made from the picture alone; it has to come from the reading. The wide boxes with their curve show the child where a digraph is read as a single sound.

Print it as the reading counterpart to the segmenting pages: base sound boxes on Monday, blend the sounds on Tuesday, with the same theme. Toys are on this sheet; other themes use the same six-row layout. One portrait page, a pencil or crayon, no writing required.