Phonics Activities for Elementary School Students

A suggested list of phonics activities that are appropriate for each early elementary grade level:

Kindergarten:

• Letter-sound matching: Show students a letter and have them identify the corresponding sound.

• Initial sound sort: Provide pictures of objects and have students sort them by their initial sound/s.

• Blending onset and rime: Say the onset (first sound) and rime (last sounds) of a word, and have students blend them (e.g., /c/ /at/ → cat).

• Decodable books with simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words.

  
  

1st Grade:

• Phoneme segmentation: Say a word and have students break it into individual sounds (e.g., "dog" → /d/ /o/ /g/).

• Phoneme manipulation: Ask students to add, delete, or substitute sounds in words (e.g., "Change 'cat' to 'hat'").

• Nonsense word fluency: Have students read and decode made-up words to practice applying phonics skills.

• Decodable books with more complex word patterns (e.g., blends, digraphs, long vowels).

  
  

2nd Grade:

• Multi-syllable word building: Provide students with word parts (prefixes, roots, suffixes) and have them construct and read multi-syllable words.

• Dictation: Dictate a sentence or short passage and have students write it while applying their phonics knowledge.

• Fluency practice with decodable texts: Have students read increasingly complex decodable passages with attention to accuracy, rate, and expression.

• Integrating phonics with comprehension: Ask students to identify and explain the phonics patterns in words within a text and how those patterns contribute to the meaning.

  
  

These activities should be tailored to the student's needs and progress.