A consonant is any letter that is not a vowel (a, e, i, o, u). There are many different words that share a combination of similar consonants and vowel. We call words that share a series of two or three common letter patterns a blend. When the same string of consonants are arranged together we call it a consonant blend. There are also vowel blends that have the same series of non-consonants. We urge you to explain the concept of blending to your students so that they can take a logical approach to better understand these words. Our advice is to start very simple and build up to the larger word chunks. When students have success with the less complicated words, it will help them progress at a faster rate. Some students will have trouble with a particular sound because of their natural speech pattern. These are the worksheets they should spend more time with. It will be different for all students. When you approach words that have consonant blends you can hear the sound of each letter in the blend itself. You will sometimes run into words that have the series of letters make one sound, these words are called digraphs.

In this section you notice that we focus our lessons primarily on two-letter blends, but there is a section that concentrates on three-letter blends. Our two-letter blends are the most commonly used words and normally serve as the starting point for this skill. You will also find a topic that directs attention to blending distinguishable sounds. We encourage you to explore all the different sections because they will help students gain experience with a wide range of sounds and broaden their vocabulary. Each interactive lesson allows you to print the PDF file to give you students a little bit of extra work to take home. Convenient answer keys allow students to make progress at their preferred paces. Please Note: The worksheet categories below will take you to an area with at least 15 worksheets to print in under each topic.