Beginning Blends Smoothie Sorting Activity

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Mmmm… smoothies! Smoothies to me are as much a part of spring and summer as pumpkin spice lattes are to fall. We love to go strawberry picking and then go home to blend up our harvest with some bananas and yogurt. This free Beginning Blends Smoothie Sorting Activity incorporates a smoothie-making pretend play element while practicing reading and sorting words with blends.

*Pair this with our Blends Writing Centers for Early Learners!

Beginning Blends Smoothie Sorting Activity

Smoothies make a fitting metaphor for blending letters together. Teaching students to blend letters opens up a whole new range of possibilities for them.

This activity focuses on recognizing beginning blends and sorting them into smoothie blenders. You can pick out just a few beginning blend sets at first, and then widen to all of them as your early readers gain experience and confidence.

The smoothie glasses each contain a word that begins with a 2-letter consonant blend, such as bl-, cl-, sp-, etc. I tried to choose mostly CCVC (consonant, consonant, vowel, consonant) words when creating this activity to keep it simple.

Preparation

You’re going to want to laminate these smoothie and blender cards for durability and reuse. This is especially important if you cut them out the way I did, rather than leaving them as little rectangular cards.

Select the sets you want your students to work on, and make copies of the included recording sheets – they’re meant to be copied double sided to save paper and ink. Otherwise just staple them together (the 2^nd page doesn’t have a place for the child’s name).

You may also like to include plastic or wooden letters to manipulate with this activity.

How to Play

The basic idea here is to sort the smoothies cards by their beginning blend by placing them with their corresponding blender.

Once they’ve sorted all the smoothies by blend, they can write down their results on the recording sheets. If you’re using this activity in a literacy center, the recording sheets are a great tool to hold students accountable.

Extension

You can extend this activity by having students build the words with plastic or wooden letters. They can build one word, remove the suffix, and then use the remaining beginning blend to build the next word.

If you have a toy blender, you can have the children pretend to mix up letters in it to make each word.

Grab Your FREE Copy

Ready to start sorting beginning blends? Grab a free copy of this Beginning Blends Smoothie Sorting Activity by clicking on the large, yellow download button below!

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Heather

Heather is a teacher turned work at home mom of three. She loves creating fun early literacy activities and crafts for preschool and kindergarten. She blogs over at Books and Giggles where she hopes you’ll find some fresh inspiration and helpful resources whether you’re a teacher, homeschooler, parent, children’s librarian, or daycare provider.

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