Tell me if you’ve ever experienced this scenario.
Teacher: “What is the first sound you hear in the word ‘ball’?”
Johnny: “/b/!!!” he shouts excitedly.
Teacher: “What is this word?” The word is balloon.
Johnny: [Crickets.]
Teacher: “How about this word?” The word is ‘shoe’.
Johnny: [Avoids eye contact.]
I’m chuckling because I know we’ve all experienced this. Students who can identify initial sounds with ease but completely stall when words get longer, or when “sh” isn’t spelled the way it sounds. If phonics were a staircase, early letter-sound work gets them on the first few steps. But what keeps them climbing? Teaching blends, segmenting, and digraphs is a critical instructional move.
These are the building blocks that help students see how words work in written English. Our early learners need clear models and engaging practice because these features of language can easily overwhelm and confuse them.
Here’s where intentional instruction on blending, segmenting and digraphs comes in. Asking early learners to decode long, multisyllabic words cold may be a challenge for some. It is best to start with what they know, like single sounds, and build up using patterns they can see, feel and hear.
Let’s take a look at a lesson from Stage Two, Module 4 of the Flying Start to Literacy: PHONICS™ program. Notice how the lesson provides opportunities for early learners to play and develop their phonological awareness skills through the various blending and segmenting exercises. They continue to strengthen their foundational skills with activities that call on them to change a sound and discover a new word. This will be a necessary skill that will helps our learners with their reading and writing when they come to unfamiliar and unknown words.
Let’s take a look at a writing example. Our learner wants to write the word ‘lake’, but they think they don’t know how to write the new word, so they appeal to you for help. We can prompt them to think about using what they know to solve the unknown. We might say something like, “You know how to write the word “make”, what do you think the word ‘lake’ looks like? What sound do you hear at the beginning to solve for the word ‘lake’?
Our goal is for our early learners to see how the work they do during their phonics lessons (blending, segmenting, etc.) comes together to help them become more fluent and skilled with their reading and writing.
Digraphs can be tricky at first but learning digraphs, like sh, ch, and th, is a big deal in building strong readers and writers. A digraph is when two letters come together to make one sound, and these sounds show up everywhere in early reading and writing. If students don’t learn to recognize and use them, they may struggle to decode words like ship, chat, or thin. Digraphs help readers move from sounding out letter by letter to recognizing sound chunks, which is a big step in becoming a fluent reader and writer. Teaching digraphs clearly and early, with lots of modeling, lots of practice and lots of real reading, gives our learners the tools they’ll use every day as they strengthen their literacy processing system.
As you reflect on your own phonics instruction, consider zooming in on your next lesson through a new lens: What small moves are helping your learners notice and use digraphs every day?
Choose a lesson from the Flying Start to Literacy: PHONICS™ digital sampler here and track where the digraph instruction lives—from oral language routines to decodable text practice. Make a note of the explicit routines, modeled language, and student opportunities to hear, say, and use the sound. Then ask yourself: What’s one small move I can adopt tomorrow to make these sound-letter patterns more visible and stickier for my early learners? - Nilaja Taylor