Welded Sound Fun

Our students often need a lot of practice with welded sounds. So we created this fun game to practice with them. Typically when we play, we set a timer for 3-5 minutes (depending on how much time we have allotted for review).

We each take turns flipping over cards and reading the word. If we read it correctly - we keep it, if we read it incorrectly - it goes back into the pile. If you draw a Take Card you get to choose an opponent to steal cards from if you get a Lose Card the cards go back into the pile. When the timer goes off the player with the most cards in their hand wins!

In our program - we focus on ang, ank, ing, ink as welded sounds and don't worry about including ong, onk, ung, and unk as welded sounds. The reason for this is that we want to reserve memory storage for patterns that truly distort the vowel sound (sound different than they would if you simply sounded out the word using a tapping strategy). While we do want to gain fluency often lumping all these patterns can just be overwhelming and confusing to our students. And since so many of them have difficulties with rote memory or phonological memory, we try to reduce the number of things we are requiring students to memorize as much as possible.

Systematic literacy intervention (more well known as Orton-Gillingham or OG) requires students to hold so many rules in memory. So wherever possible it is important to try and keep that memory load down!