I made these Cluster Reduction sequencing supports after seeing the frustration and hearing the ‘I just can’t do it!’ from a 9 year-old client who really should have eliminated the process of cluster reduction by now.
He was sick of minimal pairs but had great auditory discrimination. He just couldn’t put that ‘s’ sound in – or if he did, he would omit the second sound in the cluster. ‘Stick’ was either ‘sick’ or ‘tick’ and we were getting nowhere, revisiting this goal on and off for while.
I found that as soon as I isolated the cluster and applied the concept of imagery therapy (using a visual representation of a sound – a snake for ‘s’), it made sense and he could ‘see’ what he had to say to use clusters. By the end of that session he could rattle off ‘s-tar, star, ‘s-tick, stick’ fast and smooth.
This is great to put on your iPad, but we also cut into strips and fold the S-Blend over – my kids have to correctly blend the S+tick and tell me the new word they’ve made (stick) to flip it over. And by having the minimal pairs on the page, it really helps the child if they end up reducing the cluster.
Download from my TPT store and have 11 pages (66 sequences) of SK, SL, SN, SP, ST and SW sheets or check out my free sample which includes 1x S/R/L Blend.
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THIS is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I’ve tried CV syllables, visuals when working at the worder level, tactile strategies, and visual phonics. My 4 yr old client can sequence /sn/ in isolation but it falls apart in vowel syllables. I’m hoping this will help!! Thank you 🙂
Hope so too! Sometimes I start a little slow and then really work on blending all the sounds together and speeding it up once they have the ‘mechanics’ figured out. Good luck 🙂