Which reading stage involves children focusing on short vowels and initial consonant blends?

The Letter Name and Alphabetic Stage is characterized by children's focus on understanding the relationships between letters and their sounds, particularly short vowels and initial consonant blends. At this stage, children begin to decode simple words by recognizing that letters represent specific sounds, which allows them to blend these sounds together to form words. This focus on phonics is essential for developing basic reading skills.

Students at this stage typically start to write words phonetically, using their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to represent sounds, especially short vowels, in their writing. They learn to identify and utilize initial consonant clusters to enhance their reading and writing fluency. This foundational understanding sets the groundwork for more advanced literacy skills developed in subsequent stages.

In contrast, the other stages, such as the Syllables and Affixes Stage and the Within Word Pattern Stage, build on more complex language concepts, focusing on multisyllabic words and the use of suffixes, while the Emergent Stage centers on basic concepts of print and pre-reading skills rather than phonetic decoding.