Final answer:
Students consolidate their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme blends into larger units, which help them in recognizing complete sounds and spelling patterns efficiently for more advanced reading.
Step-by-step explanation:
When students consolidate their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme blends, they are combining their understanding of how letters or groups of letters, known as graphemes, represent sounds, or phonemes, in spoken language. This fundamental skill in reading involves blending smaller units into larger sound chunks, which can then be used to form words. While initially, this involves recognizing individual letters and their associated sounds, such as identifying the sound a 's' makes, the goal is to consolidate these into larger units where multiple letters represent a sound, such as 'sh' in 'ship' or 'ch' in 'chair', thus leading to more fluid reading.
For instance, once a student has a grasp on individual graphemes like 's', 'h', and 'p', they can then learn to blend these into larger phoneme units like 'sh' and realize that 'sh' and 'p' together make the phonetic blend in 'ship'. Over time, students will consolidate their knowledge further and recognize these blends automatically in different words, facilitating a more advanced reading level and a better understanding of spelling patterns.