Phonics Games for Kindergarten

Try these three fun phonics games perfect for children just starting to read in kindergarten or pre-school:

Letters Race

You will need a magnetic board or fridge, magnetic letters of the alphabet, and some open space for this game. Set up the magnetic board on one side of the room and the magnetic letters on the other side. Call out the letter name, or sound, or even a word starting or ending in a particular letter, and ask your child (with a ready, set, go!) to pick out the correct magnetic letter and stick it on the board. You can even call out short words and ask them to retrieve all the necessary letters.

Matching Rhymes

On a piece of paper write down each side a list of words, with each word having a rhyming counterpart on the other side of the page. Place pins next to each word. Give your child some rubber bands and ask them to match the rhyming words on each side of the page by placing the rubber bands on the pins to connect the rhyming pair.

Phonics Hop-Scotch

This is a great game that helps children develop their phoneme-grapheme correspondence skills. All you need is some chalk and the ground. Simply draw hopscotch markings on the ground (how many squares and in what shape they are arranged is up to you). In each square draw a letter of the alphabet (you may want to draw both the upper and lower case letters in each). There are many ways you can play this game, you can call out a letter or combination of letters and ask your child to jump on those letters, and as they do, to sound out each letter. Or you can ask your child to jump on the letters in alphabetical order, sounding them out as they go along. You can also roll dice and ask your child to jump on the square that comes up at the number rolled, counting the squares as they jump and sounding the letter out at the end.