Quick start
Sound boxes for sounding-out practice — a 30-second refresher.
- Pick a word source: Built-in words (ready-made decodable words), Nonsense (made-up but legal-sounding words for pure decoding), or My words (paste your own).
- Choose how many boxes — 2, 3, or 4 sounds per word. Pick more than one to mix lengths.
- Tap a box to point at a sound, then press Blend (or the B key) to sweep through and read the whole word.
- Move along with Next / Back — or the → / ← arrows and Space.
- Open Sound settings to limit the letters and sounds to just what you’ve taught.
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. 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.
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.
Reveal word shows the word in plain text under the boxes — handy for checking. Shuffle reorders the current set.
Sound settings. Pick exactly which consonants, vowels, vowel teams, pairs, and trigraphs may
appear, or jump to a whole stage with the group quick-select. The checkboxes decide whether your choices
limit the nonsense generator, the built-in words, or both. 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.
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.
ai, sh,
th, ng are detected automatically. Force a split yourself with / —
e.g. th/u/mb or r/ai/n. Inappropriate words are filtered out.
These choices shape the nonsense words, and can optionally filter the built-in real words too — see “Apply selected sounds to” below. For fully controlled practice, pick a group and tick both boxes.
A common structured-phonics order for introducing letter-sounds. The top row loads everything taught through that group; the bottom row flips one group on or off (highlighted when fully on). The checkboxes choose whether your selected sounds limit the nonsense generator, the built-in word list, or both. Later groups (r-controlled vowels) aren’t part of the nonsense generator. Fine-tune any sound with the chips below.