Blending is the ability to take individual sounds and blend them together to hear or say the whole word. For example, hearing /c/ /a/ /t/ and blending them gives you “cat.” This skill is essential for decoding words as readers convert sounds into spoken language. The other terms describe different skills: separating phonemes in a word is segmentation, substituting one phoneme for another changes the word, and creating rhymes is about matching ending sounds. The description in the prompt matches blending, making it the correct choice.

Guided reading relies on ongoing interaction with the text, with the teacher pausing during reading to pose purposeful questions. These moments of questioning help students monitor their understanding, apply strategies (like predicting, clarifying, and making inferences), and cite evidence from the text to support his or her thinking. By stopping at key points, the teacher can scaffold comprehension, model how to think aloud while reading, and guide discussion so students become more independent readers. Reading aloud with students is more about modeling fluency and listening, separate from the during-reading support. Silent reading reduces the teacher’s opportunities to guide comprehension in real time. Summarizing after finishing is a post-reading activity, not the during-reading focus that guided reading emphasizes.

Formative assessment is about ongoing checks during instruction to see how students are progressing and to adjust teaching as they learn. In literacy, that could be listening to a student read aloud and noting fluency, asking quick questions about a text to gauge comprehension, or using a short exit ticket at the end of a lesson to see what was understood that day. These checks help you tailor instruction for the next lesson. Summative assessment, on the other hand, measures what students have learned after a set period, like at the end of a unit. In literacy, an end-of-unit test or a final writing project serves this purpose, showing overall mastery of the skills taught in that unit. So the statement that formative assessment involves ongoing progress checks and summative assessment involves a unit test best captures the difference. The other options mislabel the roles—for example, end-of-unit tests are summative, while quick checks are formative, and a final project is typically summative.

The idea being tested is how to re-engage readers who are fluent but disengaged by using collaborative, interest-driven experiences. When students can read well but lose motivation, forming interactive groups around what they care about makes the activity feel relevant and social. In these groups, students discuss the text, pose and answer questions, negotiate meaning, and support one another’s understanding. Roles like discussion facilitator, questioner, or summary maker help ensure everyone contributes, while the teacher guides with open prompts that connect the text to real-world interests. This combination—peer collaboration, personal relevance, and structured participation—tends to spark attention, sustain engagement, and deepen comprehension for disengaged but fluent readers. This approach works better for engagement than methods that focus only on advancing through tasks or adjusting difficulty without tying the activity to students’ interests or social interaction.