Blending board

We’ve finished our DIBELS Next testing and our intervention groups are now in full swing. Our teachers have been bringing out those blending boards that the Career Tech students made us last year (love them!) and are using them within their small group instruction. We started using these blending boards last winter when our first grade Nonsense […]

In this post, I’ll show you how to make your own blending board for spinning fibers. You can make your own rolags with this blending board. You can also pull your own combed top or roving off of the board, so you have a long, continuous length of fiber from which to spin.

Earlier last year I was asked by Maurice Ribble to take some photos of the Electric Eel Wheel Nano and the Electric Eel Wheel 6 that could be used in advertisements for the Dreaming Robots product range. My brief was simply to add yarn and fibre to the Nano, using bright, summery colours that would complement the blue of the Electric Eel Wheel Nano 2. I looked through my stash of fibres and chose these colours from World of Wool. I knew that I wanted to use blue and orange as they are…

Full disclosure - I reached out to John Arbon Textiles and told them about my 'Spinning into Focus' technique. They very kindly sent me a sweater quantity of Slack Ma Girdle from their Appledore range of blended tops to demonstrate my method with. Last month, I shared the fourth and fifth fibre preparation methods in my Spinning into Focus technique. My idea is that by the end of this blog series, I will have a sweater quantity of different yarns, all spun from the same multi-coloured…

Ever since posting the video on how to use these blending cards to help students blend CVC words, I’ve been receiving emails asking for the directions on how to make the boards. The students at our Career Tech Center made blending boards for every kindergarten and first grade teacher in our schools with scrap wood […]

This post contains affiliate links. Like I said in my last post, it is that time of year in Kindergarten when CVC words are crucial for your kids to start blending to develop their reading skills. As I introduce each letter to my kids, I add it to my blending board. I start building their ... Read More about CVC Words and Blending Board

What do you do when your students get stuck on a word? Read this step-by-step guide to help you teach your students to decode independently.

The excitement is real when you see your dizzed fiber and the knitted swatch showing this same pattern!

I recently purchased a custom blend of merino wool from ​⁠Wingham Woolworks and I've been experimenting with various methods of preparing it to try to prevent the colours from blending together too much. There's a video version of this blog post if you'd like to take a closer look at my technique. Following on from my “Spinning into Focus” blog series, I decided to tweak Technique 8 a little to see if I could further reduce the amount of colour blending I achieved. (For my own future…

How to teach this science of reading approach of continuous blending in kindergarten. Learn more and grab a free printable here.