Blending Wheels

Children with learning disabilities typically struggle with learning to read, particularly with developing phonemic blending skills. Finding ways to provide sufficient decoding practice is an ongoing challenge for special educators. Blending wheels are tools to provide struggling readers with practice in decoding. A blending wheel is constructed with three concentric circles, made of heavy paper and joined with a brass fastener, that have letters that are aligned to form words and pseudowords. Children align the letters to read the words and turn the circles to form new words. This practice combining initial, medial, and final sounds can promote the development of decoding accuracy and automaticity.