Once you have learned the sounds that letters make you can start to put letters together to make a new sound. This is brilliant fun and a really good thing to be able to do. So we all know the sounds that a,b,c,d and all the letters of the ABC make. Then start to put two letters together like ‘st’…say them quickly as if they are stuck together with glue…see…you have made a new sound. I call them gluey sounds. There are loads of them…cr, dr, cl, sm, pl, pr, th….and so on. They are not really stuck together… but the glue might help you remember. Then once you can do them all try to put three letters together. Like…str, spr, scr, spl…you need a bit more glue for three! Then go through them all and learn them too. Now whenever you see two and three letter strings like these with all their gluey bits you can read lots more sounds and these sounds help you find out what words are saying to you. Then if you keep reading every day words become familiar then after a while when you see them you won’t have to sound them out you will just recognise them. Easy, peasy. This is great because it means you are on the road to reading.
When I am reading with someone and they come to a word they do not know we look to see if there are any ‘words within words’. This is really helpful. Take the word ‘and’ it is a gluey word… it comes up in lots of words… hand, sand, land, bandage…there are lots of them too. So you look for any words you might already know.

Think of the word ‘plant’…that has ‘ant’ in it.

Then there is ‘carpet’ that’s got ‘car’ and ‘pet’…do you see the idea?

With long words I just break them up into smaller pieces…bit like a big bar of chocolate when you break it into squares…so the word…exhibit = ex-hib-it or adventure =
ad-vent-ure…it just makes them a bit easier if you only have to do bits and then you just have to glue them back together at the end.
Hope this helps…you can use this for spelling too. Just sound out each single sound or two and three gluey sounds together when you want to spell a word, break them up and stick them back together. Then write them down as you say the sounds. Simple. Of course there are always the words that are so naughty you can’t break them up or glue them. We will have a look at some more of those soon.