How to Assess Blending Step by Step

in this video i'm going to show you how to assess your little one's blending ability and when say blending this is how many sounds can they sound out and put together lot of us think our little ones can read because they know the sounds but once you put the word in front of them you realize they actually can't read the way we thought they could right because there's this other skill called blending that's holding them back now when we think of blending we've got to think about two separate kinds of blending oral or out loud blending and written down blending that's what we think of as reading and we start with out loud this is your little one's ability to hear sounds and put them together because if they can't hear separate sounds and put them together by the time you actually write the word for them or show them the book they're not going to be able to see different sounds and put them together okay so think of it like this if we take word like the word bet and will write out this word for you i'll show you i'll put dot under each sound there are three sounds in the word bat many of us when our little one is first learning how to read we show them the word we say okay read it and then the kid can't right we're doing the written down blending and what i'm telling you is before you ever write the word down you've got to see if they can blend out loud so here's how you're going to assess it okay want you to start with two sound words okay you don't need anything in front of you you're just going to give them couple different two sound words to blend every time you say the word you're going to leave big space in the middle so here's the first sound here's the second sound you're going to put big space between it it might sound like this and you're going to listen to see if they can tell you at okay they've got it you're going to go to the second word and try the second word say and see if they can put it together into up in the notes here have list of words that you can use for the assessment so if you don't want to have to think of these on your own i've got ten two sound words ten three sound words and ten four sound words for you to go through all you're gonna do is you're gonna pick up that list you're gonna read it to your little one and leave space between each of those sounds see if they can do it okay after those two sound words you're gonna move to three sound words okay so that's gonna sound like this and then see if they can put together cut right you go through that list i've got ten words for you there and then move to those four sound words okay your job your goal is to see how many sounds can they blend together at time are they two sound blender three sound blender or four sound blender or can they just not do this at all yet and either way is fine but once you know where they're at you know where to push them they can do two sounds okay you know to practice three they can do three sounds okay you know to practice four they can do four okay you know to practice five this assessment is going to give you critical information about their blending okay after this you can give them the same assessment but written down so you can go back to two sounds and instead of saying what you're going to do is you're going to write the word you're going to ask them to read it and see if they can read at they've got it you're like great let's go to the next word let's see if you can read this word right but instead of saying it you're just writing it down and they're reading up go through the same process so out loud we went from two to three to four and written down here we're gonna go from two to three to four again i've got list ten words with two sounds ten words with three sounds ten words with four sounds that you can pull from if you need to assess your little one okay and the most important part of the assessment okay the most important thing can give you if you take one thing away from the video want it to be this an assessment is meaningless if you don't actually do something with the data the whole purpose of this is to let you know where to work with them so once you've done the assessment and you've looked at it you're either going to look at it and say okay they struggle with all of the three sound words or you're gonna say okay every time the sound was in word they had trouble putting it together right whatever the thing is you're gonna figure out this is the thing they need to work on and then you've got to figure out what to do and here's how can support you with those next steps okay i've got ton of free videos on social media across all of my platforms on blending lots and lots of tips to get you started that's completely free i've also got free training in my bio if your little one struggles with that blending out loud stage we're gonna touch on how to help improve their blending out loud because if they can't do that written down is gonna be really challenging okay i've also got full course on blending words and this is something to consider especially the older your little one is if they're six if they're seven if they're eight and they're still not able to blend three and four sound words this is something that their school is going to be expecting from them at this point and if you want to help get them over the hump quickly i've got full course that's going to give you lesson plan for how to teach blending i'm going to show you me doing the lesson plan with the child for how to teach blending right over two hours of video content you're going to get my direct support anytime you need it and that can really help get your little one to the next level the key is you've got to know what that level is here's where they are here's where they're going so i've got ton of research that can help you anywhere from free to my paid courses you decide what's gonna be best for you and for your little one otherwise hope this video is helpful hope the assessment is helpful definitely download those words so you can make this practice as quick and as fast as possible and until next time will talk to you soon