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Five Phonic Favourites

With phonics learning being a key building block for early reading, children need lots of opportunities to practise their phonics in lots of different ways.

Posted on Tuesday 01st September 2020

Having a wide range of high quality resources prepared and ready for you to use, can help you to maximise every learning opportunity. You can plan fun, engaging phonics lessons or enhance your learning environment with resources that enable children to learn through play.

In this blog we have selected five of our favourite phonics resources and shared a selection of activity ideas to inspire you.

1. 44 Sound and Spelling Phonics Tubs

There are 44 sounds that make up ever spoken word in the English language. With the help of the objects included in these tubs, children will be able to see how a variety of different spelling patterns are used to represent each of these sounds.

Activity

  • Choose one of the sound tubs and lay out the objects.
  • Get children to think of a silly sentence using all of the objects and share it aloud.
  • Ask them to write their sentence making the correct grapheme (spelling) choice each time, e.g. On my way homw from school I saw an erupting volano, a big goat, a pink flamingo with a traffic cone on its head and a boy making a snowman.

44 Sounds and Spelling Tubs

44 Sound and Spelling Phonics Tubs

2. Mini Phonics Mats

These bright and colourful mats can be used inside, outside, in sand and in water, making them the perfect versatile resource for any activity.

Activity

  • Put a selection of phonics mats in your water tray.
  • Children go fishing for a mat using a net.
  • When they have caught one, the child must say the sound out loud.
  • Increase the challenge by asking children to fish for multiple mats and then build a word with the ones they catch. Is it a real word or not?

Mini Phonics Mats

3. 44 Sounds and Spelling Bags

This highly versatile resource is double sided so can be used as a sound tile, an image or for activities that use both sides. With sound bags from phase 2 to 5, it is easy to plan for activities that revisit and consolidate learning from previous phases whilst moving children on.

Activity

  • Choose two bags that are alternative spellings for the same phoneme, e.g. c and ck.
  • Lay out the pieces from the two bags image side up and set up two hoops labelled with the different graphemes.
  • Children sort the pieces into the two hoops based on which grapheme is used in the word.
  • When sorted, children can check by turning over the pieces.

44 Sounds and Spelling Bags

4. Outdoor Sound Stars

These outdoor sound stars are colour coordinated based on the Letters and Sounds phases. They are suitable for use both indoors and outdoors.

Activity

  • Hang the stars on a wall or fence, or lay them on the ground.
  • One child must say a word out loud (you could use flashcards) and the other child must tap the sounds using a fly swat in the correct order to spell out the word.
  • Alternatively, children can tap out a sequence of sounds and their partner must blend the sounds to find out the word they were thinking of.

Outdoor Sound Stars

5. Wooden Phonics Pieces

There are so many ways you can use these wooden pieces. Here are five ideas to get you started:

  • Use the wooden pieces as counters for children to sound out and spell words.
  • Add the wooden pieces to your small world or construction area for children to explore while they play.
  • Hide the pieces in your outdoor space and let children go on a treasure hunt to find them. Can they find an object that starts with that sound?
  • Play splat the sound, with children using a fly swat to hit the sound they hear.
  • Use two sets of wooden pieces to play a game of pairs.

Wooden 44 Sounds Pieces   Wooden 100 High Frequency Word Pieces   Wooden Tricky Word Pieces

 

For more activity ideas, take a look at our range of downloadable activity guides.