6 Simple + Fun Phonics Activities to Make Your Students Excited to Read
These 6 fun phonics activities will supercharge your phonics instruction! Your students will beg to do these reading activities over and over again. They make learning less of a battle and more like educational play. Your phonics instruction will be transformed with these fun phonics activities!
6 fun phonics games and activities your students will love!
Phonics instruction is one of the most important parts of teaching reading–but let’s face it. It can get boring.
We’ve all been there. When you’re teaching and your students get that far-off, glazed-over look in their eyes.
Or when attention starts to wander and Suzy starts poking Danny with a pencil.
Or Jared busts out his latest Pokemon card to show everyone around him.
And really all of the kids just want to be doing anything else except practicing phonics.
Unfortunately, these lessons with low engagement are usually not very successful.
They can’t learn if they are off in daydream land thinking of something completely different!
So what do we do to increase engagement?
We get adventurous and add variety to our phonics activities!
🎬☝️ {here’s a video showing all of the activities in action!}
To get you started in the right direction, here are 6 insanely fun phonics activities that students absolutely love doing. They are perfectly out of the ordinary enough, but still laser-focused on phonics skills, which makes them effective.
So add a couple of these activities to your next phonics lesson plan, and see how much engagement shoots up!
Students LOVE this fun phonics activity using watercolor paint!
Phonics Activities #1: Paint Read
What student doesn’t love feeling like an artist with paint and a paintbrush? Add some words and you instantly have a super engaging phonics activity!
- Use a permanent marker or black pen (so it will show up through the paint) to write a list of words (you can also print it out).
- Give students a watercolor paint set, a small cup of water, and a paintbrush.
- Have them load their paint brush with paint, then drag it over the word as they read it.
- Doing one smooth brush stroke helps promote fluent word reading.
- Optional: give them a color code and assign a different color to each phonics pattern/type of word/etc.
Teaching phonics with a little bit of magic boosts engagement.
Phonics Activities #2: Invisible Word Reveal
Here is a really cool engagement hack you can use with almost any phonics activity for a cool magic reveal!
Basically:
- Write letters or words with a white crayon
- Color over the letters/words with a marker
- The “invisible” word will appear!
It’s so cool, it will feel like magic to your kiddos!
There are tons of ways to apply it.
Invisible Phonics Activities Ideas:
- Students write spelling words with a white crayon and then reveal them
- The teacher writes words, students use markers to reveal and read
- Invisible Matching
- Make a bingo board with “invisible” words in each box
- Make sure each word is in 2 boxes (so you have a “match” for each word)
- Students can take turns coloring in a box and reading the word.
- When there is a duplicate word, the student can cross out that match (optional: and earn a point!)
- Keep going until all the words are matched. If you are keeping score, the person who uncovered the most matches wins.
Phonics instruction with multi-sensory elements, like play dough, is super effective.
Phonics Activities #3: Play Dough Tiles + Writing
There are so many fun ways to use play dough in your phonics activities. I show you one fun phonics activity using play dough here, and also give you some more ideas in this list of multisensory learning activities.
For this activity, you will focus on spelling and writing (a great way to facilitate orthographic mapping).
You’ll need:
- Play Dough
- Letter tiles
- Toothpick
How to play:
- Roll the dough out so it’s long and flat.
- Say a word, and have students say each sound in the word.
- Then have them stick letter tiles for each sound into the play dough and read the word.
- Then take the tiles out and re-roll out the play dough so it’s flat again (or flip it over!)
- Give students a toothpick and have them try to write the word into the play dough with the toothpick by memory (saying the sounds again to help spell it).
Rainbow writing is one of the classic phonics activities for kids.
Phonics Activities #4: Rainbow Writing
Bright, fun colors can be an easy way to add a pop of fun to your phonics activities. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or fancy–just good old rainbow writing!
- Have students gather 3-5 colors of crayons.
- Have them write each word in each color of crayon.
You can change up the activity with several variations:
- Write the words next to each other horizontally in different colors
- Write the word on top of itself in different colors (so the colors are layered)
- Give students a list of 7 words and assign one color to each word. Have them write each word several times in stacking arcs, so you make a rainbow with each color being one word.
- Change up the writing medium: use markers, pens, colored pencils, whiteboard markers on a whiteboard, etc.
Changing up the writing medium can also be a fun way to add variety!
These free phonics games are so fun to use in your small group reading lessons! Click here to download these FREE Phonics Bingo games!
Phonics Activities #5: Phonics Bingo
Bingo is a fun way to add suspense and excitement to your phonics activities. I love the eager waiting as I pull out the next winning square and the students all look at me in eager anticipation–talk about engagement!
There are several ways to adapt bingo to really hone in on phonics skills.
- Write words on the bingo boards, and pull words out of a bag. The student has to find that word on their board and cover it. The first to get 3 (or 4, or however big your board is) wins!
- Write words on the bingo boards and pull out phonics patterns. Have students cover a word with that phonics pattern.
- Have phonics patterns on the bingo boards (with plenty of space around them in the square). Pull out a word and have students find a square with the phonics pattern that word has and then write the word in that square.
If you want some easy pre-made bingo boards, I have this FREE Phonics Bingo Set you can download to practice words with silent e, digraphs, vowel digraphs, and r-controlled vowels!
Click here to download these free phonics games!
This fun phonics game is hands-on and interactive.
Phonics Activities #6: Phonics Stickers
Stickers are a fun, multisensory, and very accessible phonics activity for all students! Sticking a sticker down can be less overwhelming than writing for some of our struggling or beginning readers.
When you use simple, color-coding stickers, they give great visual cues. The stickiness also engages tactile and kinesthetic senses. Multisensory learning activities are some of the most effective ways to teach phonics!
These 6 Fun Multisensory Learning Activities and this Ultimate Reading Intervention Activities List give great ideas for providing more fun and engaging multisensory activities!
Phonics Stickers:
- Use the basic “Avery Color-Coding Labels” (colored dot stickers).
- For each color of sticker, write a phonics pattern on it (ex: green = th, orange = ch, pink = sh, etc.).
- Give students a list of words with missing phonics patterns.
- Let students stick stickers in the blanks to make and read words.
These phonics activities are the perfect way to add engagement and excitement to your teaching!
Phonics skills are so important to build in effective reading instruction (learn more about the Science of Reading to find out why). But not all phonics instruction is equal. Multisensory learning and fun phonics activities are the best ways to help students learn the skills they need. I hope your students have fun playing AND learning with these phonics activities!
