4 & 5 Phoneme Blending and Segmenting Strips

Support your 1st Grade students as they practice blending and segmenting sounds with this comprehensive set of phoneme strips. Featuring 4‑phoneme and 5‑phoneme words across S blends, R blends, L blends, triple blends, short vowels, long vowels, diphthongs and r‑controlled vowels, these strips give learners repeated opportunities to break words apart and blend them smoothly. With words like slam, grass, cloud, spray, fast, train, frown, storm, stand, print, plant and spring, students build strong foundational decoding skills through hands‑on practice.

These strips are ideal for literacy groups, warm‑ups, intervention sessions, or independent practice.

How to Teach Blending & Segmenting

Blending and segmenting are essential early‑reading skills, and these strips make the process clear and accessible. Teachers can model how to tap, slide or stretch each phoneme, highlight consonant blends, and guide students to hear how sounds combine to form a word. The variety of word types helps learners recognize patterns, strengthen phoneme manipulation, and build confidence with both decoding and encoding.

The resource is designed for durability — simply print on thick card and use during small‑group rotations, whole‑class phonics lessons or as a quick reference tool.

Download and Build Phonemic Awareness

Download the 4 and 5 Phoneme Blending & Segmenting Strips to support explicit phonics instruction and give students structured practice with complex blends and multi‑phoneme words. With extensive word lists and clear categories, this pack is perfect for classrooms following systematic synthetic phonics approaches.

This resource was created by Lindsey Phillips, a teacher in Michigan and a Teach Starter collaborator.    

More Blending and Segmenting Resources for the Classroom

Looking for more blending and segmenting resources to use in the classroom? We have you covered…

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