Teaching kids to blend, or combine, sounds in order to pronounce new words is an important element to first grade reading. Segmenting the sounds that make up a word, and then blending those sounds to pronounce them correctly, can be a tricky skill to master. This lesson helps take first graders through this process, with guided practice and helpful examples.

Consonant-vowel-consonant or CVC words include examples such as paw, cow and pop. Identifying these words and understanding the sound that they make is crucial to building reading fluency. This guided lesson provides practice with CVC words by focusing on their intial, medial and ending sounds. You can boost learning with our supplemental worksheets that offer more practice with CVC words.

Second grade phonics covers more advanced rules that build upon kids' foundational reading skills, such as vowel pairs (ai, ee, ea, oo), long and short vowels, and the silent E. This guided lesson covers these three areas in order to enhance kids' skills with decoding more challenging texts. You can boost reading fluency further by printing the phonics worksheets that go with this lesson.