Hello,
I am doing private classes with an early elementary student. He goes to a school that teaches in English mostly so he is intermediate level right now. And in his English classes he is already learning phonics and knows quite a few consonant/vowal combos along with the basics. His mother has asked me to help him with reviewing the phonics since it’s hard.
I have printed some phonic letter combo boards and have done various games with him like connect 4, bingo, race games, etc. But I think we need to switch it up a bit.
Any ideas for games I can do with basic materials? I was thinking of making a battleship game with phonics but haven’t figured out how I would do that yet.
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Any ideas or resources would be appreciated!
7 comments
Sorry if my explanation is a bit wonky I’m bad at explaining without visuals but You could lay out some phonics cards and have him listen to you say the phonics, and follows the “path” of the sounds you say. (depending on the student it might be fun for him to move a doll/figure to ‘jump’ on the cards you say. Again, depending on the student, he might enjoy switching rolls and controlling your path/ watching you move the figure.)
One phonics activity I’ve been noodling around with lately is making some kind of maze worksheet activity to do a similar game where students have to take turns listening and speaking to guide their partners through the maze + a treasure at the end, heavily inspired by this https://www.altopedia.net/activities/2650-phonics-maze
Here’s a neat PowerPoint activity too
https://www.altopedia.net/activities/1180-phonics-survival-game-fall-guys-theme
Hope that could be any help at all! Good luck with your lessons!
One I do that you didn’t mention: I do a memory game that’s akin to Simon with my students. We call it “cuh-buh-duh” because our phonics boards start with short letter sounds, but you can call it whatever you want. It basically goes like this:
> Teacher, not pointing at the phonic board: Cuh, buh, duh.
> Student, pointing at the phonic board: (Points to C) Cuh, (points to B) buh, (points to D) duh.
In group classes, I keep it at a limited length (2-5 sounds at a time) for time and to accommodate stronger/weaker students, but for a solo, you could hypothetically do it like a real game of Simon and do a pattern for however long he can manage. Works well for letter combinations, too!
Also, if his level is good enough, try prompting for words that start with/contain the sound in question, as well. I find the kick in difficulty helps spice it up.
Idk what you mean by playing connect 4 or other board games to study phonics.
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Print of phonics cards like these: [https://www.teachyourmonster.org/classroom-toolkit/more-resources/printable-phonics-flashcards](https://www.teachyourmonster.org/classroom-toolkit/more-resources/printable-phonics-flashcards) They should be roughly business-card size. At first, only give your student a handful of cards, possibly with a few distractors, so that it’s not too overwhelming.
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Then, say words from this list (easy: [https://www.montessorimom.com/phonetic-word-list/](https://www.montessorimom.com/phonetic-word-list/)) or this list (more challenging: [https://www.montessorimom.com/phonogram-words/](https://www.montessorimom.com/phonogram-words/)) which contain words that can be spelled phonetically.
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Race to see who can reorganize their phonics cards into the correct order of sounds. Then, get a whiteboard of sorts, and have the student write out the sounds while saying the word themselves. Whoever can do it fastest or just whoever gets a correct answer can put a chip in the connect 4 board, or can guess a place on the battleship map, or can pull a janga block, or whatever game that you want to serve as a motivator.
If you have a little bit of a budget or his parents want to buy them, I’d recommend an AGO phonics set. It’s basically UNO but with phonics, my students love them.
The battleships with phonics is totally doable.
Put p,t,s,w,r on the y-axis and at, ot, et, it, ut, on the z-axis for example. Then play the game like normal without saying B3, but rather ‘tet’.
You can adjust the idea to having pronouns on the y and verbs on the x; or almost anything else.
We have lots of generic games that can be used to practice phonics or pretty much anything really. Check out our site
https://www.esl-classroom-games.com
Our battle bingo is good phonics practice. It’s a kind of mix between battleships and bingo, where players choose points on their opponents grid and try to find 4 letters to win. You can find the rules and materials at our site. Everything is free to download
https://esl-classroom-games.com/battle-bingo/