Which activity is most useful for developing a student's ability to blend phonemes?

The activity of asking students to say the word after hearing the sounds /c/ /a/ /t/ is particularly effective for developing a student's ability to blend phonemes. This practice directly engages students in the phonemic awareness skill of blending, which involves listening to individual sounds (phonemes) and combining them to form a word. By pronouncing the sounds separately before blending them into a cohesive word, students practice essential foundational skills necessary for reading.

Blending phonemes is critical in early literacy development, as it helps students connect sounds to letters and decode words when reading. This process strengthens their understanding of how sounds work together to form meanings, which is a fundamental aspect of learning to read effectively.

In contrast, activities like clapping out syllables or identifying rhyming words focus more on syllable segmentation and phonological awareness rather than phoneme blending specifically. Matching pictures to words helps with vocabulary recognition and comprehension but does not target the blending of sounds. Therefore, the blending activity, which reinforces the combination of phonemes into recognizable words, is the most useful in this context.