12 Phonics Activities for Kids Learning to Read

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Teaching your child to read can be tricky when you don’t necessarily know what to do first and phonics activities are hard to come by.

I often get asked from readers what they should work on first.

Phonics Activities & Letter Recognition Together

To be honest, I’ve always worked on letter recognition first with my kids. However, I have been told (repeatedly) from teachers that they should be learning letter phonics first.

I find this very hard to do if the child doesn’t know the letter, so I’m learning to pair these goals together.

Plus, phonics activities are hard to come by (and hard to come up with)!

Get Started with our Learn a Letter Week of Activities and focus on Letter Sounds!

3 Quick Steps to Get Your Child Started Reading:

Learn letter sounds with phonics activities, phonetic awareness (and couple it with letter recognition, you can find 20 activities for kids just learning their letters here)
Read to your child, a lot!
Get them started ‘reading on their own’ with simple, beginning reader books.

Of course, there are more steps to reading than this, such as book awareness (turning pages, reading left to right, front and back of book, and so on), being a good reading role model, asking your child questions about what you’re reading (comprehension), rhyming, sight words and so on.

However, these are the 3 steps to focus on as a parent. The rest will kind of fall into place as they start school. Of course, you can work on all of them, but I want to get you started in the right direction.

Reading to and with your child is the absolute most important part. Hands down.

The phonics activities that we’re sharing below take that learning up a notch and just as important, but make sure your child is interested and eager to learn and make it fun!

Let’s explore some activities that focus on letter sounds, or phonetic awareness.

Step 1: Start with phonics activities to help your child learn to read.

These phonics activities can help your child learn to read. Plus 3 steps to getting them excited about reading!

Get Started with our Learn a Letter Week of Activities and focus on Letter Sounds!

Step 2: Read aloud to your child, a lot!

There are lots of reasons for this. Point to the words as you read them. Whether it’s with your finger or something fun (like a feather or a bubble wand).

It helps kids know that every word on the page matches a word that’s being read.

Step 3: Get kids reading on their own.

How do you do this when your child isn’t able to read yet?

Put the books in your child’s hands and they are in control of what they read and how they read it. They can also choose to follow along or read by themselves. This builds their confidence in a big, big way!