Not All Phonics Activity Sheets Are Created Equal
Just as it is essential for students to receive explicit phonics instruction in small groups it is just as critical for students to practice new phonic skills in a variety of ways. Having multiple exposures to new phonics skills through reading (decoding) and through writing (encoding) helps students become fluent readers. Phonics activity sheets are a great way to do this, but not all phonics activity sheets are created equal.
It is essential that phonics activity sheets are aligned to phonic skills and practiced in conjunction with learning the new phonic skill. Phonics activity sheets are not meant to be busy work, but rather an opportunity for students to deepen their phonics understanding through application.
A daily flow I follow is after small group instruction, where students learn/review a new phonics skill, they then go work in partners or independently, to practice phonics activity sheets in multiple ways. Below are a list of phonics activity sheets that are aligned to phonics skills, low-prep (yay for parents and teachers), high-engagement (student favorites), help students become fluent readers and most importantly tried, true and loved by my students.
Phonics Game Kindergarten
Before phonics instruction ever takes place students should have strong phonemic awareness ability. Click here to learn more about phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the precursor to phonics. Remember that with phonemic awareness we are training a child’s ear and not their eyes. We are wanting students to build their ability to hear sounds and discriminate between those sounds in order to be able to fluently read and decode words later.
Rhyming is the beginning step when teaching phonemic awareness. Next, students will practice isolating initial, final and medial sounds (in that exact order). It is crucial for students to isolate and manipulate sounds because this is needed when learning to decode and read words. For example, students should identify that /c/ is the initial sound in the word ‘cat’ (initial sound isolation) and ‘cat’ changes to ‘mat’ by manipulating the initial sound (sound manipulation).
Phonemic Awareness Activities Write the Room
Write the room activities are really popular with students because they get to practice new phonics skills while moving. Research shows that the part of the brain that processes learning is also the part that processes movement, so anytime we can combine these we are really helping students learn better.
In this phonemic awareness activity of Write the Room, students go around and look at picture cards posted throughout the room or classroom. Each picture card has two different pictures on it. Some of these have two pictures that rhyme and some have two pictures that do not rhyme. Students will have a recording sheet and it is their job to determine which words rhyme and which words don’t. This activity also allows them to identify initial, final and medial sounds which are important in phonemic awareness and should be taught in that same order. Click here to view this write the room activity.
Phonics games to print
Phonics games to print are wonderful because they can be downloaded and printed virtually anywhere. Also, these games cover all phonics skills from Kindergarten through 2nd grade, which is where students spend the majority of their time learning explicit phonics rules. Below are phonics games to print that I have created and my students love. One of those students is even by own child, who can be a harsh critic because her teacher is also her mama.
Encoding Practice
I created the game Roll, Say, Cover, Write, Win for my students because I wanted them to be able to practice encoding (writing) words with new phonics skills I taught. For this game students partner up and take turns rolling a die and moving their game marker along the path. Each square has a picture on it. Students write the word of the picture they landed on. This continues back and forth between partners until all players have finished this activity game. Each game board has a targeted skill and also follows the phonics progression. This is important because students are not exposed to spelling words that they had yet to learn the phonics rule. If you are interested in this game click here.
Building Fluency
In this phonics game to print, Fluency Roll, it helps students build their fluency. It is said that students need anywhere from 4-20 exposures to new words before they are committed to memory. This fluency games allows multiple exposures to sentences, words with new phonics skills learned and sight words.
Students again take turns rolling a die. Whichever number they roll will be the sentence number they will read. Once they have read the sentence they then color in the heart next to it. Each sentence has three hearts so students will practice reading sentences multiple times. This is a fun game to practice fluency. If you are interested in this game click here.
Phonics Activity Sheets for Practicing new phonics skills
Again it is important for students to learn phonics skills with explicit, guided instruction and then to practice solidifying new concepts through reading, phonics activity sheets, orthographic mapping, games, etc. The point of phonics activity sheets is never meant to be the instruction of new material, but to provide practice for better understanding of new skills.
Orthographic Mapping
When students orthographically map a word they are storing this word in their brains so they can retrieve it whenever needed. They do this by remembering chunks/parts of words and how those parts are placed together to create a word. This is beneficial when learning single syllable words and is the stepping stone to understanding multi-syllabic words. I created activities that are phonics aligned to allow students to better orthographically map new words with targeted skills. Click here to view this activity.
Write the Room
As mentioned above, it is important for student to move while learning new skills. Write the Room is a fabulous phonics activity sheet to get students up and moving and practicing new targeted skills. Write the Room activities allow students to practice encoding (writing) words with new targeted skills. This phonics activity incorporates movement, writing but also it uses sound boxes which help students practice correct letter formation. Click here to view more of these activities.
Weekly Flow using Phonics Activity Sheets
Below is an image of how I use varied phonics activity sheets in a weekly flow to meet the needs of all the readers in my classroom. This can be modified to fit any K-2 classroom or homeschool program. Notice that each day students meet with myself (teacher) for 15-20 minutes phonics lesson. Then students complete different phonics activity sheets to practice and solidify newly learned skills.
Are you wanting to learn more about phonics teaching order and how you can support students? If so click the image below for a free guide book on how to teach reading in five easy steps. This guidebook is sure to deliver and won’t disappoint.
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