Phonics At Home Analysis

How to explore Phonics at home!

Written by Jodie Taylor, FS1 Teacher

Parent involvement helps to extend learning outside of the classroom and gives children the ability to put what they learn inside the classroom in to practice. We love getting involved in different phonics activities at school and I’m sure your children would love to practice their developing skills with you at home, showing you what they’ve learnt and progressing their learning with you.

Early development of phonics skills is vital in enabling children to progress the skills needed for reading and writing when they move to ‘big school’.

This post aims to give you the knowledge and ideas needed to have fun with phonics at home. In pre-school, we focus on ‘Phase 1’ of the

Speaking and listening are core skills which we focus on in all activities at pre-school and are continuously being developed thanks to our language rich curriculum.

There are so many fun activities and games which you can play with limited resources at home. Here are a few ideas:

• Aspect 1: General sound discrimination – environmental sounds

To develop this area you can try going on a listening walk – what can you hear? You can also listen to clips of everyday sounds and see if you can identify what each different sound is. You can explore the house and identify the different sounds that objects make, exploring blindfolded is a great way to make sure we make the most of our listening skills.

• Aspect 2: General sound discrimination – instrumental sounds

Exploring the sounds of musical instruments and other objects which can be used to make sound. Pots, pans and spoons can make great musical instruments. You could also make your own musical instruments – for example, by covering a box with paper to make a drum or adding rice to bottles to make shakers. Trying adding different items to shakers and seeing if you can match the sounds. You could also explore instruments by tapping out simple repeated sounds and playing instruments fast and slow. Try using instruments (spoons to tap sounds) when singing

Other games used to develop this area are odd one out activities, alliteration snap and alliteration treasure hunts. You can make up stories to involve your child in thinking and require no resources, two examples are “You go to the zoo what do you see?” think of different animals beginning with the same letter. The other is “I went to the shop and bought…” this is great because you can think of anything that starts with the same letter. You could also try creating stories using their name this would really capture their