Segmenting
Segmenting refers to the skill of breaking down full words into their individual sounds (phonemes). Segmenting words and blending phonemes are crucial skills that new readers develop and practice overtime. Segmenting helps them recognise the individual sounds that form words.
How are children taught to segment?
1. They Learn Sounds: Children learn the sounds that each letter/letter combination makes. For example, the letter ‘s’ makes the ‘sss’ sound.
2. Using Sound Buttons in Words: Sound buttons are dots or lines underneath each letter/group of letters to help children recognise the different sounds that make up a word.
3. Segmenting Words: Children are taught to segment full words into their individual phonemes. For example, the word ‘cat’ becomes ‘/c/ /a/ /t/’.
4. Practicing Complex Words: After practicing words that are more simple (like ‘dog’ for example) children move onto practicing segmenting with words that are longer, contain digraphs, split digraphs, trigraphs and quadgraphs for example. This helps them to progress at a steady state and develops their phonemic awareness and segmenting skills further.
5. Application in Reading and Writing: Children can use the skill of segmenting to sound out unfamiliar words they see in books.
6. Keep practicing: They then keep practicing this skill over and over until they are confident in segmenting words easily.
There are plenty of ways you can support your child’s phonics learning journey. You can play rhyming games, where you say a word and encourage your child to come up with rhyming words. This helps them hear and manipulate the sounds within words. You can play phonics games such as ‘I spy’, to further enforce the letter-sound relationship. You can play a ‘segmenting stories’ game. In this game, you can make up silly stories and segment words within it. For example, you say ” Once upon a time, a c-a-t s-a-t o-n a m-a-t”. This is a super fun and engaging way to continue learning at home.
We have plenty of handouts/resources on our website, with new ones being uploaded weekly! Click the button on the left to take you straight there.