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TheSchoolRun.com closure date

As we informed you a few months ago, TheSchoolRun has had to make the difficult decision to close due to financial pressures and the company has now ceased trading. We had hoped to keep our content available through a partnership with another educational provider, but this provider has since withdrawn from the agreement.

As a result, we now have to permanently close TheSchoolRun.com. However, to give subscribers time to download any content they’d like to keep, we will keep the website open until 31st July 2025. After this date, the site will be taken down and there will be no further access to any resources. We strongly encourage you to download and save any resources you think you may want to use in the future.

In particular, we suggest downloading:

You should already have received 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep. If you haven’t received these, please contact us at [email protected] before 31st July 2025, and we will send them to you.

We are very sorry that there is no way to continue offering access to resources and sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.

What is blending?

What is blending?
As they learn to read, children are taught individual sounds and then how to link them together to form words. By the end of Reception your child will be able to blend sounds together; find out how your child will be taught blending in school and how you can support learning at home.

What is blending?

By the end of Reception, children should be able to make the correct sound for each letter of the alphabet.

Children will also learn to blend sounds. This means that they will learn to look at a short word, such as 'tin' and rather than saying three separate sounds 't', 'i', 'n', link the sounds together and say the whole word in one go. This is a big step for many children and can take time.

    How are children taught to blend?

     
    • Children will usually focus on blending CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant) words for some time. Examples of these are: mat, rip, cot, tip, sit, cut, ham, nod etc.
    • They will then start to learn to blend consonant clusters, such as fr, cl, st, br, lk, st etc. Examples of words containing these are: frog, clap, stay, brim, milk, fast.
    • Children will also need to start blending words that contain vowel digraphs. A vowel digraph is two vowels that make up one sound, such as ai, ee, ue, found in words such as fair, bee, glue.
    • They will also learn to blend words using consonant digraphs. A consonant digraph is two consonants that make up one sound, such as sh, ch, th, found in words such as ship, chat and thin.

    When a child gets stuck on a word, a teacher will often help them to read it by getting them to look at the individual sounds. For example: if a child gets stuck on the word:

    sitting

    a teacher may point at each individual sound and encourage the child to sound them out. Sometimes it is useful for a teacher to write the word on a mini-whiteboard in bigger letters, so that they can underline the individual sounds like this:

    s  i  tt  i  ng

    Once a child has identified all of the individual sounds, they are encouraged to blend the sounds together to read the whole word.

    For more advice on helping your child to blend sounds read our teachers' tips.