Want a fun and festive way for your children to practice their sounding out and blending skills? Then look no further than this colorful Christmas phonics game!
CVC stands for consonant – vowel – consonant, and CVC words are easy words that your children will be able to sound out and blend as they begin to learn to read.
The 12 CVC presents that your children will need to unwrap are:
Bug, log, dog, cat, hat, sun, ten, six, hen, man, fox and pig.
To play this festive phonics game, your little ones will need to take one of the CVC presents from the pile and place it under the tree, they will then need to segment the word before choosing the correct letter fairy lights and placing them in the right order on the tree! A lot to think about and a lot of skills to practice!
You may also want to check out and download these other fun and free printables:
- Beginning Sounds Flash Cards
- Road Letters – For Developing Pre-Writing Skills
- Rainbow Number Bonds To Ten Cards And Game
- Fish Counting Playdough Mats
If you’re ever unsure about a word that I or your kid’s teachers use you may want to check out (and download a free copy of) my helpful parent’s guide to the words teachers say.
What Skills Can Your Little Ones Learn And Develop?
This Christmas phonics game is designed to help your children practice and develop their early reading and writing skills, such as:
- Segmenting – the ability to breakdown and hear each sound in a word
- Sounding out – saying the different sounds that the written letters make, one sound at a time
- Blending – the ability to ‘blend’ the different sounds of a word together to be able to correctly say the word
- Letter recognition – being able to recognize the letters and knowing what sounds they make
- Letter formation – if they practice tracing the letters with their fingers or writing them out after they have completed the puzzle
- Cutting Skills – if you feel they’re ready, you can let them have a go at cutting out the pieces all by themselves – they’ll need to be careful and have good scissor control if they want to cut out the pieces neatly
- Fine Motor Skills – when they’re picking up and moving the parts and placing them where they need to go
A lot of these are important skills taught during phonics lessons and can help your children take some of their first steps on the path to becoming fluent readers.
RELATED If you’d like to discover an easy to follow phonics lesson you can do at home check out this post!
How To Prepare This Christmas CVC game
First you’re going to want to download the game by clicking on the download box at the bottom of the page.
After that, you’ll need to carefully cut the presents and the fairy lights out.
There’s 12 CVC presents for them to unwrap.
That’s it, your little ones are now ready to play this CVC words game and improve their reading skills!
How To Use This Christmas Phonics Game
There’s a few different ways you can use this printable with your children depending on their reading and writing ability and which skills they need to develop.
The main way to play this game is to place a picture under the tree and see if your child can correctly identify the sounds that make up the word, then use their letter recognition skills to select the correct fairy light letters and place them in the correct order on the tree.
To make this a little easier, you may want to just start with the letters of the particular present you are using and see if they can order them correctly, before mixing letters from other words as well.
You could also do it the other way and place the letters on the tree – for example ‘dog’ – then see if your child can read it and choose the correct present to place under the tree.
If you want to get them to practice theirs letter formation skills, you could also place the CVC word presents on a blank piece of paper and see if they can correctly write the word below – you could always place the fairy letter lights next to it for them to use as a guide.
Well, there’s another phonics printable for you that I hope you and your children find useful. Be sure to check back regularly as I’ll be adding loads more printables. If you want to make sure you don’t miss any you can turn on notifications by clicking on the little bell to the right.
