Learning to Read - overcoming challenges

There's a lot of talk about Dwyer in the Montessori circles.  Unfortunately, I didn't find out about her until after Bear had already learned to read.  Many people have been emailing me recently, asking me how I taught Bear to read and what advice can I give for problem x or y.  After learning all her letter sounds (see this post as I am doing exactly the same thing with J-jo as I did with Bear) she began recognizing words she saw frequently like cat and dog and many others.  But we did hit a snag when she started to need to blend words she hadn't seen frequently (ie those she hadn't memorized).  She could tell me instantly what a word was when I segmented it, but could not hear the word when she segmented a word herself.  I continued to model segmenting and then going faster and faster until I could hear the word.  It also helped to use words with letter sounds that were more continuous - like m, and n, and l (as opposed to d and t which are clipped) to practice blending.  Eventually, she got it.  It didn't take long.  We all just had to be patient.

If your child is struggling with blending, Reading Rockets has some great games to play.  Another thing that helped was to use trap door readers that I got from Walk Beside Me. 

Do you have any additional tips for helping a child blend?