A daily academic task required of students in first grade is decoding words. A student with low working memory might be challenged due to the fact that the student needs to keep each individual phoneme in his/her working memory as he/she works to blend them.

For example, in decoding the word "cat", the student would have to decode and keep the three phonemes of /c/ /a/ /t/ in his/her working memory and then blend them.

The task might be changed by repeatedly instructing students to blend words in the following way:

1. say /k/
2. point to "a" and say /a/.
3. go back to the beginning of the word and say /ka/ as you slide under the "ca"
4.point to the "t" and say /t/
5. then say /ka/ /t/
6. then /kat/
7. finally read cat