Phonics Printables

Phonics is not that difficult to teach, as long as you approach it correctly. In terms of phonics development I think there are a few main steps that you want to take, and this should guide what kind of phonics printables you use in your lesson.

1. Stage 1-Letter Recognition: For young learners, it's very important to make sure they can accurately recognize all letters of the alphabet before starting to learn letter sounds. Some people try to teach them concurrently, and that can be confusing for some kids. There are a lot of great worksheets for this stage. One good worksheet we often used was "connect-the-dots", but instead of using numbers, we'd use the letters of the alphabet to make the picture. And once the letters were connected in the correct form, they formed a cool picture. Like a unicorn, or a 66 Oldsmobile (kidding!) Another good activity is the missing letters tracing exercise. You have students trace the letters of the alphabet (you'll need a font that makes kind of dotted lines so your students/child can trace the letters out). Have them practice tracing the letters for a few weeks in a row. Encourage them to use different colours and have fun doing it. Then, gradually remove letters from the alphabet and have students try and remember how to write them. By gradually removing letters, students will learn to memorize what shape the letters are.

2. Sound worksheets: Next, you'll have to learn the sounds that the letters make. You can make your own worksheets for this, or search for them online. But keep in mind, a lot of people that made these phonics worksheets seem to have forgotten to thoroughly cover all phonemes and graphemes. Some phonics printable websites will cover all the basic 26 letters of the alphabet, but they'll forget important digraphs like "or" and "ow". Make sure you research "synthetic phonics" to be sure your phonics printables cover all 44 phonemes and 120 graphemes of the English language.

3. Practice Blending Letters: Books are a great way to do this; specifically you're looking for "decodable readers". Here are some excellent "decodable readers" that will help your child practice reading on their own:

a. BOB BOOKS: Everyone raves about these books, and with good reason. Kids enjoy them, they make sure to review the phonetic concepts that they use in the book, and they're pretty quick.

b. FUN PHONICS BOOKS: These books have the important distinction of using comprehension questions at the end of the book to test your child's understanding of the material. Really sweet stories that your child will enjoy. Positive, upbeat story themes.

c. THE FAMILY READERS BOOKS: These books have large print for easy reading, and the extensive 72 book set has the same interesting characters and imparts good values.

4. Test Their Skills: Once they've practiced reading, it's fun and important to test their skills. There are a couple of good ways to do this. There's the misspelled word activity, where one of the words is spelled incorrectly and your child tries to find it. There's the scrabble tile game, where you say a word and your child tries to spell it out with scrabble tiles (you can race each other to see who does it first). There's the missing letters game (where you cover one of the letters and they try to guess what it is).