Phonics and Phonemic Awareness Activities to Support Early Readers

If you’re a teacher, then you know that helping young students develop strong reading skills is essential. One of the best ways to do this is by promoting phonics and phonemic awareness activities. By doing so, students will be better equipped to read and spell words correctly. Read on for some great ideas to get started!

I already shared how I came up with my Short A Blending Cards, but I have found them so successful both at home and at school that I have created more blending card sets, each with different letter sounds. But we all know that students need repetition in many different contexts to achieve fluency. Blending Cards (as much as I love them) will only get us so far.

If you’re looking for some variety, here are Phonics and Phonemic Awareness Activities to Support Early Readers!

1. Phonemic Awareness Activities

Phonemic Awareness is an important early reading skill for young learners to develop. It is the ability to play with sounds in a variety of ways to manipulate, substitute, and hear isolated sounds. It is an essential skill to develop before a student begins learning to read.

Here is a post all about phonemic awareness.

2. Segmenting and Blending Phonics Activities

Two important skills that early readers must develop are the ability to blend and segment words. Blending involves pulling together individual sounds or syllables within words; segmenting involves breaking words down into individual sounds or syllables. These are two different foundational skills that will assist children in the art of reading for most of their reading careers.

Blending and segmenting can be done with both phonemic awareness activities above and phonics activities below.

Here is a post all about blending and segmenting.

3. Phonics Activities

Phonics is different from phonemic awareness in that phonics matches the sounds to printed letters and groups of letters. If students have a solid foundation in phonemic awareness they can make a smoother transition to phonics.

Here are several phonics resources you can use with your early readers.

Kindergarten Phonics Reading Passages

If you are looking for one thing that will help your youngest emerging readers, this bundle would be my suggestion. Each of the 5 products focuses on a different short vowel sound, and the passages in the bundles build on CVC words the students have already been exposed to. Beyond the progressively more complex word families in the passages, there are blending cards, sight-word cards, and enough options that this bundle would be valuable to any early-reading classroom.

Phonics Partner Games for Two-Syllable Words

When the object of your activity is repetition, there is no better way to accomplish that task than to make it into a game. Even adults will do whatever mundane task you ask them to do if you tell them the person who does it best will win a prize at the end! These partner games are no different. The goal of all 8 games in this packet is to get kids to decode and read multisyllabic words fluently. Don’t tell the students, but the real winner with these games are teachers who just saw their students’ fluency skills soar!

Long Vowel Digraph Outlines

If you are looking for a way to make learning visible, putting it up on the wall is about as good as it gets. I used to use word lists of the different digraphs in a chart on my wall, but then I figured out a more fun way to collect those words as we ran across them! These digraph outlines are in several formats that work for interactive notebooks, a smaller wall decorations, and a larger wall decorations. Students love adding words to the digraph outline as they learn them. There are over 35 different options, so start small and dream big!

Open and Closed Two-Syllable Words Games and Activities

This activity bundle is so perfect for those emerging readers ready to move on to a bit more challenging material. Two-syllable words open up the world to our little ones. In this bundle, you will find cut-and-paste activities, a board game option, and even some flipbooks that help students make up fun nonsense words! My personal favorite is the puzzle activities. Something about being able to pull the word apart and put it back together really cements the concept in the minds of my students.

Phonics Partner Games Bundle

If you liked the idea of the partner games for two-syllable words, you are going to love this bundle! The games are all similar, but there are 4 different skills being worked on. Included are practice on high-frequency words, VCE words, two-syllable words, and long vowel teams. This bundle would be perfect for a teacher who has a wide variety of reading levels in their classroom and needs independent or station activities for each of those different ability groups.

What skill would you like to see your students master? What would be your current top Phonics and Phonemic Awareness to Support Early Readers to Engage Your Emergent Readers? Leave a comment below and let us know!