What is blending and when is my child ready? Blending is the ability to sound out individual sounds and put them together into a word. You may be more familiar with the term "sounding it out". For instance: /k/ /a/ /t/ becomes "cat". It may look something like this:
kkkkkkkkaaaaaaaaattttttttt
kkkkkaaaaaatttttt
kkkkaaattt
kkaatt
kat = cat!
When your child is able to demonstrate that he/she knows the sounds (phonemes) that each letter (grapheme) represents, then your child is ready for blending. Make sure to start off slow - with words that are three letters long first! You don't want to overwhelm a child.
Where can I find out more information? I found a very informative article on the web. It is connected to a website of a reading program. I have not researched the reading program and so I can not say one way or another whether it works. I am not endorsing the program in this blog post. However, the article of information on blending is great! Follow this link to the Right Track Reading article on blending.