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. Copy word list puts the words in the current set on the clipboard, one per line, ready to paste into a lesson plan or back into My words.
7. Glued sounds like ing, ank, all stay in one box (king → k·ing) while their chip is on in Sound settings; switch a chip off, or the whole Weld glued sounds toggle, for one letter-sound per box (k·i·ng).

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.) Words you paste under My words ignore this setting and get as many boxes as they have sounds — a five-sound word gets five boxes.

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. (While a button or link has keyboard focus, Space presses that instead; the arrows always work.)

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. Copy word list copies the current set, in its current order, one word per line — paste it into a lesson plan, or back into My words another day. Nonsense words keep their / splits so they come back with the same boxes.

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, and they gate the built-in words too: with Beginning blends off, stop and black step out but ship stays, because sh is one sound, not a blend (likewise lunch goes with Ending blends but fish stays). Vowel-initial longer words (off by default) lets words like end, elf, ask, and inch appear — otherwise 3- and 4-box words open on a consonant. (While an welds, ant and and are 2-box words, an·t, so they show anyway.) 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 goes by the spelling: the generator may use oo whenever either oo chip is on, and a nonsense oo is read with whichever sound the class knows.

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 never spells a glued sound letter by letter while that sound is welding (no a·n or i·ng — it makes an and ing as one box instead). Switch a glued chip off and its letters go back to being ordinary sounds. It also throws away anything that merely sounds like a rude word, spelled by sound rather than the dictionary way.

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). A glued sound welds only while its chip is on: switch the chip off and the word is read letter by letter (man = m · a · n, gated by the a and n chips; king = k · i · ng, gated by ng). So “sounds through group 4” shows king as three boxes, and “through group 6” (where the glued sounds live) welds it into two. The Weld glued sounds toggle (on by default) is the master switch for every source — built-in, nonsense, and your own words; while it is off the glued chips and the group-6 buttons rest, greyed out. 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.