Blending sounds into words–what an exciting step in learning to read.  Once students know a few consonants and vowels, we can begin to teach them how to blend those sounds into meaningful words.  Blending, for some students, is a challenge.  Do you have students who know their letters and sounds and can sound out any word sound-by-sound, but yet haven’t figured out how to smoothly connect the sounds?  Their reading may sound something like this:  “The /b/ /u/ /g/ bug is /u/ /n/ /d/ /e/ /r/ under the /r/ /u/ /g/ rug.”  For these students, direct instruction in blending will be needed. One way to begin instruction is to help students recognize patterns within words.  We can do this by