Blending isn't a stage you wait for — it starts as soon as a child knows three sounds (s, a, t → "sat") and runs alongside Stages 1–2. It's listed as its own stage because it's a skill, not a set of sounds: it adds no new letters, it's what makes the letters useful. Blending is pushing individual sounds together smoothly ("c-a-t" → "cat") to read; segmenting is the reverse, pulling a spoken word apart into its sounds ("cat" → /c/ /a/ /t/) to spell. Almost all practice happens on CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words — cat, dog, pin, sun — because they're the shortest words with a fully decodable, no-exceptions structure.
Why this stage matters
This is the hinge of the entire roadmap. A child who can name every letter sound but can't blend them still can't read independently — and a child who struggles here will keep struggling at every later stage, because digraphs and vowel teams are blended exactly the same way, just with more sounds. Most "my child knows the sounds but can't read" cases trace back to blending, not sound knowledge.
How long it usually takes
No separate block of weeks — it runs from the first week of Stage 1 through the end of Stage 2. Some children need 2–4 extra weeks of CVC practice after the alphabet before blending is quick; that's the widest variation in the roadmap, because blending speed (not sound knowledge) is what varies most between children at this age.
The most common struggle
Saying each sound correctly in isolation but not being able to push them together into a word — usually a rate problem (sounds said too slowly/separately), not a knowledge problem. Faster, more clipped sounding-out fixes it for most kids. Read more →