CVC Word Blending Slider: Slow Sloth Activity
Teaching children to blend individual sounds into CVC words is extra fun with this free printable sloth slider! Wouldn’t this be fun to use during a zoo unit?!
If you’ve ever seen a sloth in person at a zoo (or have been lucky enough to see one in the wild), you know that they really do move as slowly as the sloth in the movie Zootopia. And if you’ve ever spent time with an on-the-cusp new reader sounding out words, you’ll understand why the sloth is the perfect animal for helping them blend letter sounds into words.
All nine of the CVC words in this free printable begin with a continuous sound to make this activity perfect for brand new readers.
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Be sure to continue to the end of this post to read about ways to differentiate this activity.
How to Prep the Printable
There’s a little bit of cutting involved here, but you can use this with multiple students year after year if you laminate everything. Here’s what to do:
- Cut out the square around the sloth.
- Then, cut slits along the two dashed lines. (I used an Exacto knife for that part, but scissors would work too.)
- Next, cut out each tree branch and extension as shown. You can cut close to the branch, leaving a bit of blue sky.
- Make sure that you trim the branch extension close enough that it slides easily through the slider.
How to Use the Printable
Insert a branch into the slider as shown and pull it through until the first letter appears, as shown below. The student will say the letter sound, stretching it out slowly.
Then, they will slide the sloth over to the medial sound and say that aloud. Next, they can move the slider along to the ending sound.
Finally, after they have voiced the ending sound, they can move the slider over to show the entire word and then read the word!
Extend the Learning
You can differentiate this activity for more advanced learners. Create additional words for these students using brown construction paper to make new “branches”. You may want to introduce:
- CVC words that begin with continuous sounds, but with other vowels as the medial sound. For example: fed, hem, led, red, vet, fig, hip, lip, men, nip, sip, fog, hog, log, mop, not, hug, jug, mug, rug, sit, sun, tub, etc.
- CVC words beginning with non-continuous stop sounds. For example: bed, big, cat, dig, get, pet, tip, zip, etc.
- Words beginning with blends. You can increase the difficulty by writing the first two letters together rather than spaced out. For example: clap, clip, drop, flag, drip, grip, stop, trip, etc.
You May Also Like
CVC Polar Bear Sliders – This set of winter CVC sliders in my store is also lots of fun!
CVC Lemonade Word Building – If you’re reading this in the summertime, then you may like this cute lemonade-themed CVC resource where kids spell out words with ice cubes in a lemonade “glass”.
Birthday Cake CVC Activity – This free printable word work activity is fun any time of year!