Are you looking for ways to make your phonics lessons more engaging? Try these easy ways to gamify your phonics activities and get your students up and moving! Here are five fun games to play with any phonics posters that will reinforce reading skills and make learning fun!
Don’t have posters? Make your own! Write the target skill or phonics spelling pattern on a sheet of paper. These no-prep games are easy to add to your phonics lessons and they’re also perfect to do during recess.
Human Word Walls
Start by deciding which phonics patterns to focus on for this game. Choose a few students to hold the phonics posters and have them spread out around the room. The rest of the students will choose a phonics pattern and write a word in that pattern on a sticky note.
When the teacher says Go!, students put their sticky notes on the correct poster. Make this game a little sillier by having students stick the sticky notes on the students holding the posters instead of the actual poster (as long as students are comfortable with this, of course!).
Gallery Walk
Another easy way to gamify your phonics activities is to place phonics posters around the room. Partners walk to each poster. Each partner generates a word in that pattern and the other partner uses it in a sentence.
Alternatively, you could have both students generate as many words in the pattern as possible and write them on a small white board. Students can generate the words as a team, or independently to see who can come up with the most words!
Task cards also lend themselves well to gallery walks. I’m a big fan of gallery walks because they make any activity more fun and can easily be done independently during centers.
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Relay Races
Divide the class into groups of relay teams. Place posters out in a row leaving space between each one. Have students form a line in their relay teams, as they would in a typical relay race.
When the teacher says Go!, the first student on each team races to the poster and says a word in the phonics pattern on the poster. For example, if the first poster is an R-controlled vowels poster, students will say an R-controlled word (like argue, car, dirt, corn, or hurt).
Then, the students run back to their team to tag the next person to go to the next poster. The first team to gather all of the posters and correctly say a word in that phonics pattern is the winning team!
Musical Posters
This next phonics game is a twist on the classic game of musical chairs. Make enough copies of posters to have one for each student. An alternative to using posters is to write phonics patterns on sheets of paper. Place the posters or papers in a circle on the floor, or tape them to the back of chairs and place the chairs in a circle.
Play some fun music for students. When the music starts, students walk around the outside of the circle of posters. When the music stops, students land on a poster and shout a word in the phonics pattern they landed on.
Soak the Sound!
This game is a fun one to do outside with small groups during summer school or for intervention groups. Laminate phonics posters and hang them around the playground with masking tape. You say the sound and students use a water gun to squirt the poster with the correct pattern!
Add some of these phonics games to your weekly phonics routine to get your learners up and moving, and having fun learning!
For complete phonics units with Powerpoints, worksheets, centers, decodables and more, check out our complete line of phonics teaching resources. You’ll find everything you need to help your students become stronger readers!
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