Blending Sounds to Read Words
Your child can sound out a word they've never seen — /sh/… /o/… /p/ — and push the sounds together to read shop.
In curriculum terms
Apply phonic knowledge to blend sounds in unfamiliar words containing taught grapheme-phoneme correspondences; respond speedily to graphemes for all 40+ phonemes
Ages are typical, not deadlines — follow your child’s pace. How to help at home →
How to tell they’ve got it
Tick these off as you see them — no test required.
🖨 Print this page to keep the checklist — it prints beautifully.
Try this together
When your child comes across a word they haven't seen before, can they sound it out bit by bit and blend the parts together to read it — even if it takes a moment?
Where this sits on the map
Stuck here? Check the skills it builds on first. Confident? Here’s what it unlocks.
solid = must come firstdashed = helps
Curriculum alignment
Where this fits in the official school curriculum — our best automated guess, not yet checked by a person.
Show candidate curriculum codes · 3 ACARA · 2 NSW · 3 VIC
Australian Curriculum v9 candidate
understand how to apply knowledge of phoneme–grapheme (sound–letter) relationships, syllables, and blending and segmenting to fluently read and write multisyllabic words with more complex letter patterns
segment words into separate phonemes (sounds) including consonant blends or clusters at the beginnings and ends of words (phonological awareness)
use phoneme–grapheme (sound–letter) relationships and less common letter patterns to spell words
NSW syllabus codes & stages only
Victorian Curriculum 2.0 codes & levels only
These are candidate alignments generated by semantic matching — machine-suggested and unreviewed (v0.1), not official or verified mappings. For official curriculum content see australiancurriculum.edu.au, curriculum.nsw.edu.au and f10.vcaa.vic.edu.au. Don’t rely on them for registration or compliance purposes.