Digital Beach Mixed Blends Literacy Activity
Working on mixed blends over the summer is going to be a blast for your students with this digital beach mixed blends activity.
Beach Mixed Blends Activity
Over the summer, it’s important for students to practice key phonics skills that they’ve learned throughout the year. This helps keep their skills fresh and prevents the summer slide.
One of the most important skills for students to practice in kindergarten and first grade is beginning and ending blends. This skill is introduced after students are comfortable with CVC words and are ready to take on a new level in their reading journey.
This digital beach mixed blends activity is a great way for students to practice working with mixed blends in words. This activity is perfect for young learners and helps them begin to sound out and decode words with blends in a developmentally appropriate way. It can also be used in the classroom or at home over the summer.
This digital activity will help students apply phonemic awareness and phonics skills to begin reading words with consonant blends. As they work with this beach-themed activity, they’ll practice building and reading words with all of the short vowel sounds and these blends:
- fr
- st
- sl
- dr
- fl
- sw
- nd
- mp
- nt
- lk
Setting Up the Beach Mixed Blends Activity in Google Slides
Students may use Google Slides™ to do this activity.
The download file includes a detailed guide with instructions and pictures on how to use this activity with your students, but it is quite simple to do.
If you are a instructor or teacher, you will want to copy the Google Slides assignment to your Google Drive and save it as a master copy.
Make sure that you click the dropdown next to the attachment. Pick the “Make a copy for each student” option.
Setting Up the Beach Blends Activity in Seesaw
Students can also use this activity in Seesaw, if you would like.
You will click the Seesaw specific link in the download file. When you arrive at the activity, you will need to click the “Save Activity” button. Then you will assign the activity to your students.
Working on Mixed Blends
Working on mixed blends is a huge early literacy skill for students to master. This will help them to sound out and decode more words as they grow as readers. This beach-themed activity will bring the fun and interactive learning to working on mixed blends over the summer. Since it’s digital, it’s easy to assign to students and requires no prep. Students still get to interact in a hands-on way with the drag and drop features.
To play, students will look at the picture on each beach-themed slide. They’ll determine what the picture word is. They’ll look at the bank of letters and blends. Then, they’ll drag and drop the letters and blends to build the word. Each slide has 1 blend and 2 letters for the students to use to build the 4 letter word. Each word has a short vowel sound in the middle.
This activity has 13 slides, giving students many opportunities to practice building words with mixed blends and letters. There are 7 slides for beginning blends and 6 for ending blends.
Ways to Differentiate the Beach Word Building Activity
There are many ways to use and differentiate the beach blends activity. With many different learning styles and skill levels in your classroom, it’s important to be able to meet their individual needs.
You can use this digital blends activity during whole group instruction to practice this skill. It can also be incorporated into mini lessons, small group word work, or literacy centers. If you want your students to work more independently, they can practice on their own during independent work time, morning work, or early finishers.
During small groups, you can group your students by skill level and differentiate the slides that you assign to them. If students are struggling with either beginning or ending blends, you can remove the other slides and have them only work on those slides. You can also mix up all of the slides for more of a challenge for your higher level students.
A few ideas for differentiating this digital beach mixed blends activity are:
- Assign fewer slides to make it a bit easier.
- Challenge students to complete all slides if they’re ready.
- Target certain short vowel words by assigning certain slides.
- Focus on either beginning or ending blends by assigning certain slides.
- Mix up the beginning and ending blend word slides for a challenge.
- Have students point to each blend and sound as they say it, sliding their finger across the word to blend the sounds.
- Have students who are ready for more of a challenge write a sentence using the word and sight words.
- Identify a rhyming word.
- Tell the word family.
- Write the words in alphabetical order.
I can’t wait for your students to get their hands on this activity and practice their mixed blends all summer long. They’ll come back to school in the fall with confidence in their reading skills.
If you’re looking for more interactive and easy-to-use activities, check out these digital activities and add them to your lesson plans this summer!
Click the button below to get the Digital Beach Mixed Blends Word Building activity for Google Slides and Seesaw.
Here are some more ocean activities to check out!
Ocean Letter Sound Isolation Mats for Slides and Seesaw
Ocean CVC Word Work Digital Activity
Editable Ocean Word Work Digital Mats for Seesaw and Slides