Blending Practice

Quick start

Sound boxes for sounding-out practice — a 30-second refresher.

1. Pick a word source: Built-in words (ready-made decodable words), Nonsense (made-up but legal-sounding words for pure decoding — real words are screened out), or My words (paste your own).
2. Choose how many boxes — 2, 3, or 4 sounds per word. Pick more than one to mix lengths.
3. Tap a box to point at a sound, then press Blend (or the B key) to sweep through and read the whole word.
4. Move along with Next / Back — or the → / ← arrows and Space.
5. Open Sound settings to limit the letters and sounds to just what you’ve taught.
6. Glued sounds like ing, ank, all stay in one box (king → k·ing) — toggle this off in Sound settings if you want one letter-sound per box instead.

Your choices are saved on this computer, so the page comes back the way you left it.

How Blending Practice works

Each box holds one sound. Children point at the sounds left to right, then blend them together into a word — the core skill behind decoding. Here is what each control does.

Word sources. Built-in words are ready-made decodable words, sorted automatically by how many sounds they have. Nonsense makes up words that aren’t real but still follow English spelling rules — useful for testing pure decoding with no guessing from memory. Real words are screened out of the nonsense automatically (students are quick to memorize real CVC words, which defeats the point). My words lets you paste your own list (one per line, or separated by commas or spaces); letter teams like ai, sh, th, ng are detected automatically, and you can force a split yourself with / — e.g. th/u/mb or r/ai/n. Inappropriate words are screened out. The box holds about 1,500 words — far more than a lesson needs — and a longer paste is cut off at that point.

Boxes. Choose 2, 3, or 4 sounds per word — or pick more than one to mix word lengths in the same session. (A box is one sound, not one letter, so ship fills three boxes: sh · i · p.)

Blend, Next & Back. Tap any box to point at it; press Blend to sweep across and say the word. Next and Back step through the list. From the keyboard: Space or → for next, ← for back, B to blend, R to reveal.

Reveal word (next to Blend, or the R key) shows the word in plain text under the boxes — flip it on and off while you practise to check an answer. Shuffle (in the setup bar) reorders the current set.

Sound settings. Pick exactly which consonants, vowels, vowel teams, pairs, doubles, trigraphs, and glued sounds may appear, or jump to a whole stage with the group quick-select. Your selections always apply to both the nonsense generator and the built-in words — turn a sound off and words that use it stop appearing. Words you paste yourself under My words are never filtered: you typed them, so they always show. Beginning and ending blends have their own toggles; Vowel-initial longer words (off by default) lets words like ant and end appear — otherwise 3- and 4-box words open on a consonant. Open-syllable words (also off by default) lets 2-box words like go, he, and my appear — their vowel is long, not the short sound the vowel chip stands for, so they stay out until you want them.

Magic e. Words like cake break as c · a_e · k: the split vowel a_e is one sound and one box, and the silent e rides along in it. The Magic e chips (a_e … u_e) gate these words. Only the strict pattern counts — one vowel, one consonant, then e — so house or paste is not treated as magic e, and neither is a vowel before r (care, here). Exceptions like have and come still get the magic-e split, so check for those yourself.

Two-sound teams. oo, ow, and ea each spell two common sounds, so each has two chips: oo (moon) / oo (book), ow (cow) / ow (snow), and ea (bead) / ea (bread). The tool sorts words by a short list of the second-sound words (book, snow, bread …); anything it doesn’t recognise gets the first sound. Nonsense words always use the first sound.

What the nonsense generator avoids. Beyond screening out real words, it never puts c or g right before e or i (the soft-c/g rule), never puts w or qu before short a (wash, quad), never puts r right after a vowel team (ear, oor), and, with welding on, never splits a from a following ll, m, or n — those are the glued sounds.

Glued / welded sounds. In words like king, bank, and ball the vowel is “glued” to what follows and is taught as one chunk, so each fills a single box: k · ing, b · ank, b · all (shown gold with a double underline). The Weld glued sounds toggle (on by default) controls this everywhere — built-in, nonsense, and your own words. With welding on, king is a 2-box word. Turn it off to go back to one-letter-sound-per-box (k · i · ng). You can always override a single word with / — e.g. type k/i/ng to force the split just that once.

Raise boxes (below the buttons) nudges the boxes higher up the screen, adding empty space below them — useful on short laptop screens or classroom projectors where the boxes otherwise sit too low.

Everything is remembered on this computer, so the page reopens just as you left it. Copy settings (at the bottom) copies every choice — sources, box counts, sounds, and the rest — as a block of text you can paste into a document, handy for keeping a record per student or for moving a set-up to another computer. Paste settings reads that text back in and applies it.