R Blend Words

Tr is the R blend to start with, because the words are the ones your child already says. Train, trash, tray: nothing here needs explaining before it can be read.

Trap, trip and trot are the three-consonant-and-a-vowel words, four sounds each, and they are the cleanest practice on the page.

Train, tray and trash each have one more thing going on, and the sound boxes show what: ai and ay are one sound in two letters, and the sh at the end of trash is one sound too. The tr at the front is the opposite, two letters doing two jobs.

Dr is the family children most often hear as one sound, something like “jr”. That is normal speech rather than a mistake, and it is worth knowing about because a child who hears one sound has no reason to write two letters.

Drip and drop belong together. Same blend, one vowel apart, and saying them in a row makes the vowel the only thing to listen for.

Dry is three sounds in three letters, with the y doing the vowel’s job at the end. Drink is the longest word here at five sounds, and dress is four sounds in five letters, because the ss spells one.

Br words are four sounds each, and in most of them one of those four is a letter team. Bread is b, r, ea, d: the ea spells one sound, the same as in head.

Brush and broom are the pair to read first, because a child can point at both of them in the kitchen.

Bring is worth a second look on the sound boxes sheet. The ng at the end is one sound, not two, so bring has four boxes for five letters. That is the same idea as the blend at the front, run backwards.

Cr sounds almost exactly like gr to a young ear, which is why these two families are worth keeping a week apart rather than teaching together.

Crab and crib are the two to start with, four sounds each and both easy to picture.

Cry is three sounds, with y as the vowel, and crown has the ow team in the middle. Both are common enough that leaving them out to keep the list tidy would be the wrong call.

Gr is the family to teach after cr, not alongside it. The two blends differ by one quiet feature of the first sound, and a child who meets both in the same week will mix them up for a month.

Grow is the shortest at three sounds, with the ow team spelling the vowel. Grin and grab are the four-sound pair to start on, and grass and grill each end in a double letter that spells one sound.

Grass and grill are also a spelling lesson in disguise. The ss and the ll are the FLOSS pattern, which the 1st grade spelling list practises properly. Here they are just one sound at the end of a word.

Fr is the easiest R blend to hear, because the f can be stretched out for as long as you like and the r arrives after it. Fffffrog.

Frog and fresh are the two to read first. Both are four sounds, and both are words a child uses.

Free, fruit and from are here because they turn up constantly in early books. Free is three sounds (the ee is one), fruit is four, and from is the one children read as “form” about half the time, which is worth catching now.

Pr is the last L or R blend most programs teach, and this is the shortest section on the page. There are fewer pr words a young child knows, and padding the list with prim and prod would not help anyone.

Press and prop are the two that are worth practising, four sounds each.

Print is five sounds and has a blend at both ends, pr at the front and nt at the back. It is the hardest word on this page, and it is a good one to come back to after ending blend words.

Every word on this ladder starts with an r blend, and the two letters blend into one another without either sound disappearing. That is what makes them harder to write than the words above: a child who hears trap has to catch both the /t/ and the /r/ before the vowel arrives.

The ladder is the test of it. Moving from trip to drip swaps one sound at the front of the blend and leaves everything else alone, so a child who writes drip has heard the blend as two sounds rather than as one lump.

Where to go next depends on what was hard.

• If the r itself is the problem rather than the reading, that is a speech question. Keep reading the words, and talk to a speech-language pathologist if it worries you.
• If the two sounds ran together, sound boxes are the fix: Elkonin boxes has a blank pack for any word.
• S blend words are the easiest family and L blend words sit between the two.
• Ending blend words covers the blends at the other end of the word, which is where most spelling mistakes live.
• Consonant blends explains what all four families have in common, and how a blend differs from a digraph like sh.