Want to teach your children phonics at home? Well here’s a cute and colorful beginning sounds game you can use to help them learn the initial sounds of words.
This spring themed preschool activity is great for helping your little ones to recognize what the different letters look like and start listening for the beginning sounds in words.
This pack contains 26 pairs of beginning sounds flowers – one for every letter of the alphabet. I’ve made them all lower case as these are the main letters they will come across when learning to read.
What Skills Can Your Little Ones Learn And Develop?
This beginning sounds game is designed to help your children practice and develop their early reading skills, such as:
- Hearing beginning sounds – this is the ability to hear and recognize the first sound of a word
- Letter recognition – knowing what the written form (letters) of the sounds look like
If you line the flowers up to spell some simple CVC words – e.g cat, your children can also have a go at:
- Sounding out – this is saying the different sounds that the written letters make, one sound at a time.
- Blending – the ability to put the different sounds of a word together to be able to correctly say the word.
These are important skills taught during phonics lessons and 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 Beginning Sounds Game
First you need to download the game by clicking on the download box at the bottom of the page.
After that, you’ll need to carefully cut them out (or roughly if you’re that kind of person…).
There’s 52 flowers included in total.
It can take a while to cut them all out so you may just want to do it in sets relating to the phonics stages.
Then I’d advise laminating them to keep them nice so you can reuse them.
That’s it, your little ones are now ready to start learning their beginning letter sounds.
How To Use This Beginning Sounds Game
This spring sound matching game would be great as part of a phonics lesson you can do you self at home. Here’s a few ways you can you the flowers (I’m sure you’d be able to think up some more as well).
Sound Matching Game
One activity you could do is to lay some of the picture flowers on the floor. If your children are learning set 1 then you could put down the penguin, apple, snake and tiger. Then give them the ‘s’ letter flower and see if they can pick out the right picture to match the sound.
You could also put down all the sounds and pictures and see if they can move them all into the correct matching pairs.
Blending Activity
You could lay the flowers with the letters out to spell easy CVC (consonant, vowel consonant) words like cat or dog and see if they can sound out and blend them correctly to read the word.
Check out this post about phonics lessons at home to see how to do this correctly.
Sound Sorting Game
You could also use them as the base of a sound sorting game. Choose a few letter flowers, let’s say A, S and T and put those on the floor. Then get a range of objects that begin with those sounds (sock, apple, toothbrush etc.) and see if your little ones can place the correct objects under the correct cards.
You could always time this as they get better and mix up the cards and objects as they learn new sounds.
Memory Game
You could challenge your little ones even further by playing a memory game with them.
I’m sure you know how to play this game (sometimes called pairs), but in case you don’t it’s pretty easy:
- First, shuffle all the flowers together (you might want to just do a set or two to start with)
- Then lay them all face down in neat rows
- Starting with the youngest player, take turns turning two cards over
- If they match, you can keep them and have another go. If they don’t your turn is over and play moves to the the next player.
- Play continues in this fashion until the last pair is collected
- Count up all cards (a good chance to get a bit of counting practice in) and whoever has the most wins!
This game is great for developing memory and concentration skills.
I hope you and your little learners enjoy this beginning sounds game.
