Consonant blends – speaking and spelling

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Synthetic Phonics programmes now talk of  ‘consonant blends’ or ‘adjacent consonants’, but what are they? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while ‘ck’ are not? Speech and language therapist, Hema Desai explains the difference and suggests fun, multisensory activities to embed learning. As a speech and language […]

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Adjacent consonants – why children need practice

Many children struggle when reading words with adjacent consonants. These are words that  have two consonants side by side within a word, e.g. f l a g. The leap from three-sound words (e.g. h a t) to four-sound words (e.g. l i m p) is very difficult for many beginner and struggling readers. The step […]

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The importance of skills practice when learning to read

Learning to read, initially, has two components: knowledge: learning the graphemes and the sounds they represent skills: learning to blend sounds into words and segment sounds for spelling. Many teachers offer lots of fun ways to learn graphemes. They do this in step-by-step progression, starting from the simple graphemes and progressing to the more-complex ones. […]

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New Workbook for Dandelion Launchers – sneak preview

We are delighted to announce that our new Dandelion Launchers workbook for Units 8-10 is in the last stages of production and will soon be available.  This workbook focuses on adjacent consonants. To find out why this may be a useful resource for your pupils click here

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What are adjacent consonants?

Synthetic Phonics programmes now talk of ‘adjacent consonants’. What are adjacent consonants? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while the letters ‘ck’ are not?

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Tricky adjacent consonants

We have found that lots of children are OK blending 3 sound words but have difficulty blending 4 and 5 sounds words with adjacent consonants  (CVCC, CCVC and CCVCC words). Dandelion Launchers  series now has 12 new books which tackle this reading skill.   With no more than 10 words of text on each page, and 4 […]

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