This band covers two things that look alike on the page and behave differently. A digraph is two letters making one new sound — sh in 'ship', ch in 'much', th in 'thin', ng in 'ring'. A blend is two or three letters that each keep their own sound but are said quickly together — st in 'stop', fl in 'flag', dr in 'drum', and at the end of words nd in 'hand', mp in 'jump', st in 'fast'.
How it is taught
Digraphs are usually introduced before blends, because a child who still tries to sound out sh as /s/ plus /h/ cannot read 'ship' at all. Blends come next and are taught as sounds you can still hear separately if you slow down — which is the test children are given to tell the two apart. Final blends ('hand', 'milk', 'tent') tend to be harder than initial ones and are worth their own practice rather than being assumed once 'stop' and 'flag' are secure.
Where children get stuck
- The second letter of an initial blend gets dropped in spelling: 'sop' for 'stop', 'fag' for 'flag', 'dum' for 'drum'.
- In final blends the nasal is the casualty — 'jup' for 'jump', 'had' for 'hand', 'sad' for 'sand' — because /n/ and /m/ before another consonant are genuinely hard to hear.
- Children try to split digraphs into their two letter sounds, reading 'ship' as /s/-/h/-/i/-/p/ or writing 'chat' as 'cat'.
- th is two different sounds — voiced in 'this', unvoiced in 'thin' — which surprises children who expect one letter pair to mean one sound.
- ng at the end of 'ring' is one sound, not /n/ plus /g/, and often gets spelled 'rin' or 'ringg'.
Word list
All 20 words here are single-syllable, so they are read and spelled whole.