Blend Ladders

Hi, Friends!  We are so very excited to be a part of this collaborative blog.  We are Ashley and Brooklynn, the duo behind Markers and Mascara.  We teach kindergarten in a small town, East of Birmingham, AL.  Neither of us ever dreamed we would be teaching kindergarten.  Our old principal told us we were "kindergarten teachers at heart, we just didn't know it"…and, boy, was she right!  We cannot imagine being anywhere else!

 You may be wondering what in the world we mean when we use the term, "Blend Ladders".  To us, blend ladders have revolutionized our students' ability to read words quickly.  As beginning teachers, we taught our students to "sound out" words; and gave them strategies like, word families.  However, we noticed that many of our students were forgetting the first sound.  We know many teachers teach CVC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) words by teaching onset and rhime or through word families.  We used to teach that way, until we discovered a way that allowed our students to "hold" all of the sounds to read.  Take a look at the video below to see how we begin the year, using blend ladders.  

 Through teaching students to blend together the first two sounds in a word, we found that students left off the first sounds less and less.  In fact, students don't really have the opportunity to leave them off with this method.  After repeated practice, students begin to see the sounds as one, when reading, and are able to quickly add the last sound to read.  In our classrooms, we have found that this method is also helpful when we move on to teaching digraphs and consonant blends later in the year. 



If you are interested in a set for your own students/children, please jump over to our TPT store (by clicking the cover below) for a FREEBIE set!  We suggest printing these off on colored card stock or paper.  Our students love using red and green for Christmas and orange ladders for Halloween!

In addition, today is the last day to enter The Primary Punchbowl's giveaway.  If you haven't joined in on the Fall Blog Hop, take a peek HERE to do so.  Also, be sure to follow the links at the bottom of the post in order to get tons of fall ideas, lots of freebies, and see all of the awesome products marked to half off!

Thank you for stopping by to visit The Primary Punchbowl and take time to read about Blend Ladders!  We wish you all lots of success this school year and hope that you have a very HAPPY FALL!