Word wheels are an excellent activity to assist children in nailing down blending. Blending is introduced during word building. Writing before reading y’all! Students may grasp it immediately or spend a good amount of time here. This is why individualized learning is vital! Having a variety of blending activities on hand is critical to those loitering in blending land. Word wheels are one of these activities.
I like word wheels because they are a scaffold for blending. The end of the word stays the same and only the initial sound changes. So the blending of an initial sound with the end or rime of a word is the skill being isolated.
Word wheels are best introduced on an individual basis. It certainly doesn’t hurt to give the lesson upon request, because if a student is not ready for them, they’ll put them away pretty quickly, (or at least after giving them a few spins).
The Lesson
In the language sequence I use, word wheels fall after word building and words and pictures. You can model reading a word wheel by starting with the open segment between letters, reading only the rime. Then turn the wheel so the segment shows a letter. Say the sound of the letter and then the rime. Stretch the sounds out until the word is audible. Ex. “Op. M-op. mmm—op. Mop!” Turn and read the wheel until your student wants to begin or until you’ve ready through each word. Holding and turning the word wheel is so appealing that your student might be raring to hold it as soon as you sit down. If so, just be sure that they understand the idea that each segment creates a word that can be blended and read.
The word wheels I have created, isolate the blending of CVC words, one vowel at a time. There is also a set of consonant blends that can be used after word building with consonant blends and words and pictures with consonant blends.
Word Wheel Extensions
An extension to word wheels is a “make your own” version where students cut out and assemble a word wheel and then fill it out to create their own word wheel to take home. To isolate the writing and word building portion, these wheels could be preconstructed. The assembly part may carry a lot of the appeal. Students could choose their own color too, if you print the page on different color construction paper.
With the “make your own” version, students can copy the word wheels on the shelf or choose their own ending and beginning sounds. When they choose their own, they will probably end up with some made up words or real words spelled unconventionally.
Also, there’s a good chance that some “4 letter words” end up on their wheel! So have a plan for how you might approach this. Most of the parents at my school find this funny and with a heads up, are well prepared for how they want to address it. I usually fall into the “don’t give it much attention” camp, but I’ve been at other schools where this would not fly!
More Word Blending
The other two activities that I keep in my language sequence for blending are environmental labels and word slides. Word slides work similar to word wheels but allow the initial and middle sound to be repeated and the ending sound to change. I don’t like to make the word slides available for “make your own” because the first set of CVC ones do not use conventional spelling. This is to isolate the blending skill. The subsequent set of CVC + word slides are spelled conventionally, but add in some phonics rules. I really love word slides for practicing consonant blends!
