Sounds out words

Helping Kids Sound Out Words (+ FREE Downloads!)

by Marie Rippel

When you read, you probably don’t spend much time decoding the individual words. You just read, and as you get to each word, you instantly recognize it. But beginning readers don’t have that kind of instant recall yet, so it is important to teach them how to sound out words.

What Does “Sounding Out Words” Mean?

When you sound out a word, you say each sound in the word slowly (s…i…t), and then say the sounds together more quickly (sit). The technical term for this process is blending because sounds are blended together to form a word. Here’s a quick demo:

Our free Blending Procedure PDF has complete step-by-step instructions for both one-syllable and multisyllabic words.

Why Is Sounding Out (or Blending) Important?

When a child can say the sounds of the letters in the order in which they appear, and can then blend those sounds into a recognizable word, she is able to read thousands of phonetically regular words.

Because it unlocks so many words, blending is an important step toward the goal of reading comprehension. In fact, research shows that learning to sound out words has a powerful effect on reading comprehension.¹

What Kids Should Know Before Sounding Out Words

Before you attempt to teach your child to sound out words, check to see if he is ready. Here’s a free Reading Readiness Checklist for you to download. If you discover that your child isn’t quite ready for reading instruction, you can use the All About Reading Pre-reading program to prepare.

After you’ve used the checklist to ensure that your child is ready to learn to read, it’s time to teach the letter-sound correspondences of several letters of the alphabet. The letters M, S, P, and A are a good place to start because the sounds are easy to pronounce and several interesting words can be formed right away.

Before we get into the four easy steps for teaching blending, let’s discuss a problem that many beginning readers encounter. Recognizing this problem will help you better understand the steps for blending.

Short-term Memory Issues Can Affect Blending

When kids first learn how to decode three-letter words, they have to juggle several cognitive processes simultaneously:

• They must recognize the letters.
• They must retrieve the sounds of those letters.
• They must hold all three sounds in the memory while they sound out the word.

There is a lot going on in their brains! In fact, it is very common for beginning readers to have difficulty with standard blending procedures. Just about anyone who has taught blending has encountered a situation like this:

What just happened there? Here’s the problem: by the time the child got to the third letter, he had forgotten the sounds of the first two letters, and then had to resort to guessing. But it’s not that kids can’t remember three things in a row—it’s just that there are too many competing processes going on in their heads at once.

It’s easy to understand the problem. But what can we do to help?

“Cumulative Blending” Solves This Problem

Cumulative blending is quite simple. Start by building a phonetically regular word with the Letter Tiles app or physical letter tiles and then follow the steps below. We’ll demonstrate with the word map.

1. Touch one letter at a time and say the sound of each letter.

2. Go back to the beginning of the word and blend the first two sounds together.

3. Start over at the beginning of the word. Slide your finger under the letters and blend all three sounds together.

4. Finally, say the word at a normal pace, as we do when we speak.

This is called cumulative blending because there are successive additions of the letter sounds. First we blend the first two sounds (/mă/). Then we start at the beginning of the word again, this time blending all three sounds (/măp/). If there were more sounds in the word, as in split, we’d start at the beginning of the word for each successive addition:

/sp/

/spl/

/splĭ/

/splĭt/

Cumulative blending provides the extra support, or “scaffolding,” that beginning readers need. When you feel your student is ready, he can try blending all three letters without this additional step, but don’t try to withdraw the support too soon. These steps and the support they provide help memory issues immensely.

Download a Free Blending Lesson

Would you like to see how we teach blending in the All About Reading program? Download this sample lesson!

This is the first lesson in AAR Level 1. The blending activities start on page 4 of the PDF.

The All About Reading program walks you through blending and all the skills your student needs to become a strong reader. The program is multisensory, motivating, and complete. And if you ever need a helping hand, we’re here for you.

What’s your take on teaching kids to sound out words? Have anything else to share? Let me know in the comments below!

___________________________________
¹ University of Royal Holloway London. (2017, April 20). Phonics works: Sounding out words is best way to teach reading, study suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 1, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com

Sound It Out!

About this Game

Premium Activity

The standards correlation for this activity is coming soon!

The standards correlation for this activity is coming soon!

Sound It Out! lets beginning readers practice phoneme (letter sound) and grapheme (sound spelling) relationships by dragging and dropping letters to spell a word correctly. Students can choose from two game themes.

Try Sound It Out!

with a sample list!

• K-2ndDigraphs Diverse
• K-2ndLong e Words
• 3rd-5thLong Vowel Patterns
• 3rd-5thDiphthong oi/oy

Note: Although this activity is designed for the grade levels above, it can also be used as a remediation or enrichment activity at any grade level with an appropriate word list.

Create your own word lists and more with Premium Membership

Learn More

• Foundational Skills
• Phonics

What? When a beginning reader comes across an unfamiliar word, they are often told to sound it out. More...Less

Sounding out involves decoding, which is applying knowledge of letter-sound correspondence and patterns in order to pronounce words correctly. Decoding is a foundational skill needed to build phonics and reading fluency. Kindergarten and first grade students learn to decode words with simple patterns, like CVC words. From third grade on, students begin identifying word chunks to decode multisyllabic words. Some words are more difficult to sound out than others, due to irregular phonetic patterns.

When? Students first learn about letters (graphemes) and the their relation to sounds (phonemes) in kindergarten and first grade when studying the alphabet. More...Less

Kindergartners and first graders will then learn to build on their alphabetic knowledge to be able to decode and sound out simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, like cat. As students move to higher grade levels, they will be exposed to increasingly complex phonetic patterns. For example, first grade students will study vowel digraphs like /ow/. In 2nd grade, students will study silent letter patterns, like /kn/. Later, in upper elementary and middle school, students will be exposed to multisyllabic words and will chunk word parts, like prefixes and suffixes, to decode. Throughout K-12 English language arts, students will learn phonetic patterns in order to better sound out words and become fluent readers.

How to teach: Often teachers assign weekly spelling words that follow a particular spelling pattern. Sound It Out! engages students in interactive spelling practice. The learning game can be used during literacy centers or part of homework, as independent work.

Play to learn: Students click the sound blocks to sound out the words they hear. More...Less

A word is broken up by graphemes, just how words are broken up in an Elkonin box. When a student places the letter(s) in the wrong spot, immediate feedback is given. Students are given 1 to 5 attempts depending on the number of graphemes in the word. After using all attempts or after a correct response, the game will show students the correct way to sound out the word and will show the word in Elkonin boxes. Students who responded correctly can skip over the visual of the Elkonin boxes and the audio of the correct pronunciation. Students will continue to work on the game until they have tried to sound out all words on their word list.

Teaching Tip: Sound it Out! can supplement K-8 phonics instruction during word study or homework. VocabularySpellingCity’s ready-made Words Their Way lists are a suitable choice for students K-12. Primary students can practice simple spelling patterns, like the silent e. Students in grades 3-5 can sound out more complex patterns, like final unstressed syllables, while students in grades 6-12 can benefit from Sound It Out! to decode multisyllabic words. English Language Learners (ELLs) can benefit from phonics practice using Sound It Out! because of the audio visual features. Sound It Out! can be effective with high frequency words, as they follow unusual phonetic patterns and are difficult to sound out. Also, avoid pairing the game with an abbreviations word list.

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Narakeet allows you to easily convert text to voice to create audio and video files using speech synthesizers that provide natural sounding. Start using our text-to-speech synthesizers for free. Select one of the male or female voices and enter your text in the box below to turn the text into a voice and create an audio file.

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Artificial intelligence speech synthesizers recognize text based on context. They do a great job with individual paragraphs, but sometimes it can be difficult for them to guess the meaning of small fragments, especially when reading words that have the same spelling but different meanings. To ensure correct speech synthesis when reading such words, select one of the voices marked "Stress", for example: "Sergey", "Natalya", "Tatiana" and "Yuri". 9iki

In addition to these voices, Narakeet online voiceover is performed using 400+ voices in 70+ languages.

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How to read text?

With the Narakeet tool, you can create audio and video materials for various purposes. Below are a few examples of situations in which Narakeet voice acting can be used.

• voiceover of the text by a male voice
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How to read text with your voice? How to convert text to voice?

Use Narakeet to quickly convert text to voice online. It will be much easier and simpler than voicing the text yourself.

How to read text on the computer?

In order to read the text by voice, paste the text you need into the "Text" field, select an online Russian speech synthesizer and click on the "Create audio" button.

What program reads the text?

Narakeet is an application that can convert text to voice online. You can use it on any device connected to the Internet. Online voiceover does not require any software to be installed, just use your browser.

Is it possible to voice books? What program reads the text?

Narakeet voices text online using realistic speech synthesizers. Thanks to this application, you can easily convert speech from text to voice.

How to make a video with voice acting?

To create a video with audio, create a Powerpoint presentation and type the text for audio in the presentation notes. After that, upload the presentation to Narakeet. You will receive a video with voice acting in just a few minutes.

How to read text in PDF?

If you want to read the text in a PDF document, use Narakeet's text-to-speech converter. Click the "Upload File" button to upload your document. After that, click on the "Create Audio" button to convert text to voice. The voice acting of the words will be performed in Russian after selecting one of the voices for reading in Russian.

How to make the computer read the text itself? How to make voice acting from text?

Just copy the text or type it in the "Text" field and select one of the proposed voices to voice the text online in Russian.

Which program reads the text?

Narakeet is a program that can make voiceovers from text. This is an opportunity to reproduce the reading of text online in different languages ​​using different voices. Test our application if you need voice acting for free.

Narakeet helps you create narrated videos quickly, using text-to-speech to turn Powerpoint presentations and Markdown scripts into engaging videos. It is under active development, so things change frequently. Keep up to date: rss, Slack, twitter, youtube, facebook, instagram, TikTok

The media on this page includes images by Maria Rodideal, YASU SHOTS, Monica Silva, Mike Austin, Max Titov, alan bajura, Andrey Kurgan, Ben Parker, Valery Tenevoy, Grigore Ricky, Max Titov on Unsplash.

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