Blending and Segmenting: The Two Phonemic Awareness Skills That Unlock Reading and Spelling
By Lauren Kline, M.S., CCC-SLP, A/OGA, C-SLDI Head of Literacy, Bjorem Literacy ®
If you want to help a child learn to read and spell, two skills sit at the very center of that work: blending and segmenting. They are both components of phonemic awareness — one of the five pillars of literacy identified by the National Reading Panel — and together they form the foundation of decoding and encoding.
If you have ever wondered what blending and segmenting actually are, or what the difference between blending and segmenting comes down to in practice, this guide breaks down both skills and shows you how to build them with simple, hands-on activities.
Here is what each one means and why both matter.
What Is Blending?
Blending is the ability to push individual sounds together to form a word. When a child hears "s" "a" "t" and says "sat," they are blending. This is the skill that makes decoding possible. A child who cannot blend sounds together cannot read words, even if they know every letter sound perfectly. Blending is the bridge between knowing sounds and reading print.
What Is Segmenting?
Segmenting is the reverse. It is the ability to break a spoken word into its individual sounds. When a child hears "sat" and says "s" "a" "t", they are segmenting. This skill is what makes spelling possible. A child who cannot segment words into sounds cannot map those sounds onto letters. Segmenting is the bridge between hearing words and writing them.
Most early instruction begins with oral blending and segmenting - pushing sounds together by ear before letters are even introduced - so that children can blend and segment phonemes confidently before they ever touch print.
What Is the Difference Between Blending and Segmenting?
The difference between segmenting and blending is really a matter of direction: blending builds a word up from its individual sounds, while segmenting breaks a whole word back down into those sounds.
These two skills work together constantly in literacy instruction. Decode a word — blend. Spell a word — segment. They are two sides of the same coin, and both need to be taught explicitly.
Where Do You Start?
For early learners, the answer is simple: start with a small, high-utility set of letters and build words from there.
Links and Ladders: CVC Word Chaining Cards are designed exactly for this. Word List 1 uses just six letters — S, A, T, P, I, and N — and from those six letters alone, you can build a powerful set of CVC words:
sit, sat, pat, pit, pin, nip, tip, tap, tan, pan
These words are short, decodable, and phonemically regular. They are perfect for early blending and segmenting practice because every sound maps predictably to a letter. There are no surprises, no silent letters, no vowel teams — just clean sound-to-print correspondence that gives early learners immediate success.
Word chaining takes this one step further. Instead of practicing words in isolation, word chaining builds, modifies, and transforms words by adding, removing, or substituting a single letter at a time. Sit becomes sat. Sat becomes pat. Pat becomes pit. Each change requires the student to segment the original word, identify which sound changed, and blend the new word. It is one of the most efficient blending and segmenting activities you can run, and because it feels like a puzzle, it doubles as one of the most engaging blending and segmenting games for early readers. It is also one of the most efficient and engaging ways to build both phonemic awareness and decoding skills simultaneously.
Pairing Links and Ladders with Better Letters
For students who are already familiar with Bjorem Speech Sound Cues, adding Better Letters into your blending and segmenting work is a natural and powerful next step.
Better Letters Educator Edition bridges the gap between phonemes and graphemes. Each card provides a visual anchor for a letter and its sound — using the same picture mnemonics from the Bjorem Speech Sound Cues system your students already know, now paired explicitly with the written letter.
Here is how to bring the two tools together:
Step 1 — Lay out the Better Letters cards for your target letters. For Word List 1 from Links and Ladders, pull the cards for S, A, T, P, I, and N. Place them where your student can see them.
Step 2 — Build the first word with the Links and Ladders cards. Say each sound as you place the letter. Point to the corresponding Better Letters card for each phoneme. This reinforces the phoneme-grapheme connection while the student is blending.
Step 3 — Practice segmenting. Say the whole word and have the student segment it back to you, touching each Better Letters card as they produce each sound. The visual anchor of the card supports sound production and phoneme awareness at the same time.
Step 4 — Chain to the next word. Swap one Links and Ladders card. Ask the student: which sound changed? Which Better Letters card do we need now? This requires active phoneme manipulation — the highest level of phonemic awareness. Repeated across a session, these segmenting and blending words build the fluency that decoding and spelling depend on.
For students with speech sound disorders, this approach does double duty. You are targeting phoneme production accuracy through the Better Letters cues while simultaneously building the phonemic awareness skills that support reading and spelling. That is integrated speech-to-print instruction in a single session.
Why This Matters
Phonemic awareness is not a pre-reading skill that children either have or do not have. It is a teachable, trainable set of skills — and blending and segmenting are at the top of that list. When SLPs use tools like Links and Ladders and Better Letters together, they are not just doing speech therapy. They are building readers and spellers.
That is exactly within your scope of practice. And it does not require a separate literacy session. It fits right into the work you are already doing.
Lauren Kline, M.S., CCC-SLP, A/OGA, C-SLDI is the Head of Literacy at Bjorem Speech® and a specialist in structured literacy and speech sound disorders. She presents nationally on integrating literacy into speech-language therapy.
Explore Links and Ladders and Better Letters® Educator Edition at bjoremspeech.com.
