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Blending requires students to hold sounds in their working memory and smoothly connect them to form words, which can be challenging — especially when they struggle with phonological working memory or when words include stop consonants or multiple graphemes.

This course explores how to teach blending effectively, from continuous phoneme blending for early readers to additive blending and word attack strategies for longer and more complex words.

You’ll learn evidence-based strategies that make your phonics instruction more powerful and help students move from sounding out to fluent and accurate word reading.

It’s designed for teachers, literacy support staff, and tutors who teach early reading or work with students struggling to blend and decode unfamiliar words.

You’ll learn how to teach continuous blending, apply additive blending for longer words, and integrate phonics, syllable, and morphology knowledge to support fluent decoding and mispronunciation correction.

The course includes clear explanations, classroom examples, and practical strategies to model and practise blending, chunking, and word attack skills with your students.

Teachers and support staff will gain a shared understanding of how to explicitly teach blending and decoding, improving reading accuracy and confidence across classrooms and intervention settings.

Yes — this course draws on current research, including studies such as González-Frey & Ehri (2020), which found connected phonation to be more effective than segmented blending for teaching early decoding.