The jump from producing single letter sounds to blending is HUGE.
Emmy knows all of the letters/letter sounds, but there is still room to become more fluent.
While we continue to work on fluency, I have added in VC combinations to begin working on blending. She will see the VC combinations again (as word families) once she begins decoding CVC words in kindergarten.
Real VC words such as on, it, and an are printed in red. VC combinations that are not real words like ig and ez are printed in black. These are nonsense combinations, which are often used in reading assessments.
Targeting these literacy skills before kindergarten is not developmentally appropriate in a whole group, preschool setting. This is something to implement for children who are intrinsically motivated to read (like Emmy) and have met appropriate literacy milestones. Each child’s timeline is different. Ellis is 3.5 and doesn’t even care to recognize the letters in her own name. She probably won’t be working on these skills at Emmy’s age. And that’s okay!
