Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Activities to Support Early Readers
When it comes to teaching, reading skills are essential. Reading is the method of absorbing information from every other content area. This is why a solid foundation in early reading skills is so important for little ones like your kindergarteners and primary students.
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 Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Activities to Engage Your Emergent Readers!
1. Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic Awareness is an important early reading skill 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 begin learning to read.
Here is a post all about phonemic awareness.
2. Segmenting and Blending 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 career.
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.
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 the 8 games in this packet is to get kids decoding and reading 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 decoration, and a larger wall decoration. 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? Don’t hesitate to send a message and ask for what you need! What would be your current top Phonics Activities to Engage Your Emergent Readers?
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