This page contains games and activities to do with your children to increase their phonemic awareness. This is the early stage that you should be teaching your child before starting with the phonics and sight words but is extremely important in developing their abilities to differentiate sounds.

• Go for a listening walk: tell you child that it’s a special walk and they have to notice all the sounds they can hear (cars, birds, aeroplanes, talking etc.). Get them to talk about the sounds as they hear them and also to try to imitate them. When you get back, ask them to remember what sounds they heard.

• Take a drumstick (wooden, not chicken) into the garden and get them to listen to the different sounds it makes by tapping, stroking or dragging it against different things (wooden post, drainpipe, metal post, wire fence, plant pots…). Ask which their favourite sound is and get them to play a tune using different sounds.

• Hide a doll or toy in the garden or house and tell the child they must ‘rescue’ it. Guide them towards where it is hidden by humming or singing louder as they get nearer and quieter as they get further away from the hiding place.

• Record or download different environmental sounds such as animal noises, sounds from the city (cars, trains…) etc. and play a game where the children have to listen carefully and identify the sound they hear. You could make a lotto game where they have to match the sound to its picture or alternatively buy a commercially produced one such as Living & Learning – Soundtracks or Smartkids Animal and Nature Sound Lotto

• Sing action songs encouraging your child to perform a range of different actions in time with the rhythm or the beat of the song. Sing songs extra slowly then extra fast or quietly then loudly. The BBC has a good page for this and another can be found here

• Learn nursery rhymes or other songs with rhyming words and play at singing them, missing the second rhyming word for you child to fill in.

• Clap, march, jump, skip etc. to the beat of their favourite songs.

• Play rhyming eye spy. (I spy with my little eye, something that rhymes with…). Give suggestions at first until they get the hang of rhyming.

• Play the usual eye spy for words beginning with a certain letter, but don’t say the letter name, but the sound that it makes. (See link here) Some children may need help thinking of objects that begin with the letter and say anything they see, but with help and suggestions will eventually get the idea.

• Talk like a robot, separating the sounds in simple short words and let your child guess what you’re trying to say, e.g. “I can see a c-a-t” Do not say the letter names, but the letter sounds as above.

• Play a game using the above robot talk. Put some objects hidden in a bag or box. Say the word in robot talk and your child has to tell you what the object really is. If they are right they win a point, or the object. If not, show them the object, say the robot word then the ‘real’ word and put it back in the bag.

• When your child is familiar with your robot talk, ask your child to talk like a robot and segment the sounds within a word. You can play the same game with objects in a bag, but this time they take the adult role and you have to guess which object they are saying in robot talk.

• Encourage the use of robot talk at various times throughout the day. For example when asking what they would like to eat (“Do you want ch-ee-se or h-a-m in your sandwich?”)

• Think of cvc (consonant-vowel-consonant such as pig or pen) words using the letters they know and sound them out using robot talk, clapping each letter sound, then clap the sounds quicker and quicker to blend the phonemes to make the whole word.

• Make a river on the floor with a blanket, or with chalk outside. Put various objects on the floor on one side of the river where your child is. You stand on the other side of the river with a ‘prize’ ( a hug, a kiss, a sticker or whatever you like). Say “Bring me the ….”, naming one object in robot talk, saying the sounds separately. If they bring you the correct object, jumping over the river, they get the prize!

• Get your child to clap the phonemes when they are saying words in robot talk and count how many phonemes are used.

Any questions feel free to get in touch on our mail lynne@teachyourchildtoread.com

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