Fun Family Phonics

There are many courses out there to teach phonics and it can be confusing trying to decide which one to go with. The problem is that not all phonics courses are created equally. Some phonics courses are overpriced, some lack good support material, some use rather shady business practices so that you can’t claim your refund, and the biggest problem with a lot of phonics courses is that they fail to make phonics fun.

This issue of having fun while learning phonics is absolutely critical. If your child sees phonics as boring and dull, then they will be hesitant to study it with you.

So how do you make phonics fun? That’s a big question that we faced at my school. On face value, phonics wouldn’t seem to lend itself to games that young children could play, but there are actually a lot of games that you can use to make phonics entertaining.

Newspaper search: This one is really easy to do. Let’s say you just learned a blend, like “sp”. You’d give your child a highlighter and see how many times they could find it in the newspaper within a minute. Use a timer (egg timer or a stopwatch) to make it more exciting.

Dance Dance Phonics: This one takes a little more setup. You probably don’t have many hula hoops lying around, but one thing I used to do was say a sound like “buh buh”, then children would jump to the circle with the “B” in it. And if I said “duh duh” then they’d jump to the circle with the “D” in it. Sometimes I’d say a sound that wasn’t actually in one of the hoops to catch if they were listening or not.

Scrabble Tiles: This can work two ways. One way is to take a few consonants and vowels out then allow your child to arrange them and then you pronounce the word for them. Kids really enjoy seeing what kind of sounds come together. Or, alternatively, you can have a word written on a flashcard, say the word, and see if they can spell it correctly. If you’re teaching phonics and have a big group of kids, you can pour out the bag of letter tiles and see which team can correctly spell the word the fastest.

My Story: Have children draw pictures based on their life and then you write simple sentences underneath the picture that describe what is happening. This keeps the reading material relevant to their lives while teaching reading and writing skills (you can ask the children to trace over the sentence in a different colour).

These are just a few games to enjoy fun family phonics. Learning phonics and reading skills is critical and I hope you try some of these games out and have fun doing it!