Segmenting - Word Chains

Segmenting Skills-

Many children with literacy difficulties find it hard to segment words into individual phonemes. This is a key skill for writing. Word Chain games using graphemes encourage children to develop word building skills, which in turn supports their writing skills. By including digraphs and trigraphs as bonded units we encourage children to automatically group letters when reading and writing. Word Chains allow us to focus on the specific area a child needs support with at a specific moment and to track development over time.

A child may need specific support with-

• perceiving the final letter in CVC words.

• perceiving the difference between medial vowels

• perceiving the difference between confusable consonants, either due to visual (eg /b/-/d/) or articulatory (eg /c/-/g/) similarities.

• perceiving consonant blends, especially the second sound in initial blends and the first sound in final blends.

These games are deceptively simple- only a single phoneme is changed. However, the child must orally segment the target word, compare that to the previous word on this list, identify which phoneme has changed and how to represent it using graphemes.

The Word Chain lists progress from simple CVC words, like ‘dog’ and ‘cat’, to more complex words with initial and final blends, like ‘stand’ and ‘crisp’. This allows targeted practice of a very specific skill in just a few minutes.