Blending, segmenting, and phoneme manipulation skills are fundamental skills for the development of reading and spelling abilities. Blending: combining individual phonemes (the smallest units of sound in a language) together to form a word. It is the ability to smoothly and accurately merge sounds to identify the word they create. For example, if given the sounds /k/, /a/, and /t/, a child with good blending skills can put them together to correctly say “cat.” This skill is particularly importan