In order to implement a balanced approach, I first taught my students two phonemes
per lesson for a period of eight weeks in the first semester. During the first few weeks
of the second semester, students were taught consonant and initial digraph sounds.
Later, I taught students to blend (taking sounds and blending them together to make a
word) and to segment (being able to hear a word and then say the individual sounds in
the word) during the internship weeks (Johnson & Miner, 2005).