One of the best ways to support your child in their learning to read journey is through hands-on activities. Each week as we work through the Learning to Read with Phonics programme we suggest activities for Word Building Games and Activities that you and your child can do together using the letters of the week. These activities can be used to work on blending the phonemes and digraphs that they learn as well as the high-frequency and tricky words that you and they may come across in this progression.
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How to Teach Word Building
Using the phonics system, we teach word building by blending the phonemes, digraphs and trigraphs that the children learn each week. In the UK school system, it is important the children learn to read real words and nonsense words as in the Year 1 Phonics test they are required to read both accurately to show that they have a sound understanding of phonics.
Using materials from around the home you can easily use these simple word making, practical activities with your reception/kindergarten aged child to support them learn their 3 letter, 4 letter and 5 letter words.
So go ahead and try some of these creative phonics activities and word building exercises with your child as they learn to read.
Word Building Games and Activities
Build the word with blocks
This simple activity uses children’s building blocks to build words – we love that we can us single blocks for a phoneme e.g. S and double for digraphs e.g. oo and then triple blocks for trigraphs like the “igh” in the image above. Megablocks – Duplo or even wooden blocks work really well for this.
Flip Word Booklets
Simple to make and you can work on CVC and CVVC words easily with these. Just make some sets and let your child read them out to you remember that they need to read the “fake words” as well as the real ones accurately.
Sliding Words Activity
Another simple DIY Word Building Activity that you can reuse is our Sliding Words Activity. This lets you work up from 3 letter words all the way through to using the split digraph (or magic e as we learnt at school) to support reading and making words.
Peg and Stick Word Building Activity
Raid the craft box and create these build a word peg and sticks. Buy a couple of bags of wooden pegs and follow our instructions so that you and your child can develop a full set to help learn to read and later with spelling homework as they move through the school.
Stamping Words Activity for Learning to Read and Spell
With stamps some modelling clay and lots of resources you can help your child with this Stamping Play Dough build a word activity. We have a few suggestions on how to use the play dough and stamps in different ways – don’t use them all at once keep returning to the simple materials and try different methods each time.
Make your own Salt Dough Letters
Use this simple DIY Alphabet Set to make words and read them out loud. We recommended adding in a mini whiteboard helping to support your child with their writing at the same time as learning to read and spell.
Use Scrabble tiles to build words
There are so many variations of this simple activity that you can do with your child check out the extensions and also see how you can combine this word building exercise with mathematics to extend it further.
Sound Mat Write, Spell and Read Activities for Learning to Read with Phonics
Use sounds mats to make words to support spellings and reading. You can get your phase 2 sound mat free when you sign up to our newsletter and use this to support learning to read with simple hands-on phonics activities.
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