Fun Blending Games - Crafty Jolly Phonics

The skill of blending sounds is important from the very beginning. As soon as your students know the first 3 sounds, as taught using the Jolly Phonics program, they can in theory blend, segment and do dictation exercises. The 2 words in question being ‘sat’ and ‘at‘.

What purpose do solitary sounds serve if not to become words; words that have meaning. So how do sounds become words?

Sounds become words by simply blending them with other sounds. This is the whole purpose of learning our sounds in the first place. We need to blend sounds together to form words. Words can then be recognized and understood by others. Words have meaning. Words matter.

When teaching young learners how to blend their sounds one can become quite imaginative. A synonym for the verb ‘to blend’ could be ‘to join’ or ‘to unite’, amongst many more. So, what fun games would young learners be receptive to when learning how to ‘blend’, ‘join’, ‘unite’ their sounds?

I will outline and elaborate upon 5 tried and tested games, in no particular order, that I have personally used as a teacher of young learners.

Game 1: ‘I Want to Run to You’

Anyone of a certain age may recognize this game name as a line in the song ‘Run To You’, as sung by Ms. Whitney Houston, but for our blending game it will merely serve as its name or at the most a possibly familiar melody for the teacher playing the game.

Game Objective: To blend sounds together and form meaningful words.

Materials Needed: Alphabet Letter Cards

For this game to work you will need alphabet letter cards and a sense of humor with a bucket-load of enthusiasm, and fortunately most young learners have the latter 2 attributes in abundance.

How to Play this game:

Presuming you want to blend the simple word ‘cat’ you will need 3 volunteers as the word ‘cat‘ has 3 separate sounds /c/, /a/, /t/. You can tell the students the word that they will be blending in advance. Then, all 3 students will each be assigned a corner of the classroom with their respective letter cards.

The students then go to the separate corners of the room as assigned and when you and their classmates shout out ‘I Want to Run to You’ they all must run to the front of the classroom and position themselves in the correct order to form the word ‘cat‘.

The students can hold their A4 lower case letter cards up high, whilst they stand next to each other so that everyone can see the blended word ‘cat’. The students can call out their individual sounds. Therefore, the child with the /c/ sound will say ‘/c/’, whilst the child holding the /a/ sound card will follow by making the ‘/a/’ sound and finally the child holding the /t/ sound card will make the ‘/t/’ sound. They then repeat this exercise, but each time they get faster and faster until the sounds from the word ‘cat’ blend into each other smoothly and naturally.

You can play this game for words of any number of sounds.

Blending games such as this one can be played often, either in small groups or as a whole class. Only use words with letter sounds that you have previously taught in class.

All photos used in this blog have been taken with permission from https://www.freepik.com/

To read up on more games that you can use when teaching young learners the skill of blending sounds then look no further than my e-book available at https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/5-fun-creative-games-when-blending-sounds-13009029