Phonics instruction plays a key role in teaching students to understand the sounds of letters and that certain letter combinations make specific sounds. Practicing phonemic awareness helps students decode words and increases their word recognition, which ultimately increases their reading fluency. Phonics supports new readers and language learners and helps them understand the predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.
Quality phonics activities help to engage young learners, struggling readers, and English language learners in practicing important phonics skills. Listed below are phonics printables and activities from Evan-Moor’s TeacherFileBox, a digital lesson library that allows you to design your lessons around your students’ needs. With over 2,000 phonics worksheets—including minibooks and games—the TeacherFileBox lesson library provides teachers, homeschoolers, and parents with engaging phonics practice and instruction to foster reading skills.
Phonics Readers
Phonics readers give children their own minibook and engage them in reading and practicing word families. Perfect for the classroom or home, phonics readers provide consistent practice and can be read over and over. TeacherFileBox provides over 120 phonics readers for grades PreK–3! Simply cut out and fold the phonics page, then give children the phonics minibook to color and read!
Phonics Printables and Worksheets
Practicing phonemic awareness helps children decode words and increases their word recognition, which ultimately increases their reading fluency. These engaging phonics activities in TeacherFileBox provide important practice of letter combinations. The phonics activities begin with grade PreK and progress by grade level to increase the skill practice.
Beginning sounds
Consonant Blends and Sounds
Vowel Digraphs and Word Families
Weekly Phonics Units
Weekly phonics units provide systematic instruction, practice, and application over 32 weeks. Perfect for morning work, small group instruction, or review, these in-depth units help students review and practice important phonics skills. Each week focuses on one phonics skill, and the daily lessons progress through scaffolded listening and speaking activities to reading and writing activities.
Hands-On Phonics Games
These colorful games are a great way to reinforce sound and letter correlations.
Additional Phonics Activities
The fun activities listed below are creative ways to keep students practicing important phonemic rules.
Alphabet Hunt: An alphabet hunt is a fun and interactive way to teach letter and sound combinations. For beginning readers, matching objects with the same beginning and ending sounds reinforces this concept. Assign a letter of the week and have students find objects within the classroom that have the same beginning sound as the weekly letter. Depending on your class, you could assign more than one letter per week. (Students could also bring objects from home to share as well.)
Rhyming Phonics Game: Gather sets of rhyming objects to play the game “rhyme in a bag.” Split the sets, so half are placed in a paper bag and half are placed on a table. Have students reach into the bag, pull out an object, and match it to an item on the table that rhymes.
- Pen, hen
- Sock, rock
- Fan, can
- Boat, coat
Rhyming can help children understand that words that share common sounds often share common letters.
Phonics Flip Book: Phonics flip books can be a fun way to teach sound and letter combinations. All you need is a wire-bound index card notebook, scissors, tape, and markers. You may design your flip book to practice three-letter words and sounds, blends, or word families. Word families help children identify common spellings and sounds in words.
To make a blending flip book:
- Divide and cut the notebook into three sections.
- Label the first, second, and last paper with letters A–Z.
- It is OK if your combinations don’t all make words. The purpose of this technique is to teach blending of sounds.
To make a word-family flip book:
- Divide and cut the notebook into two sections.
- Write your word family in the last section.
- Choose letters that form words with your word families.
Find these phonics printables and more in TeacherFileBox! Simplify your planning process and find the resources you need for every student in every subject area. TeacherFileBox includes 80,000 activities and lessons for grades PreK–6 and simplifies the lesson planning process with easy search options and diverse resources.
TeacherFileBox provides teachers and parents with over 80,000 printable lessons across the PreK–6 curriculum. Try TeacherFileBox for free for 14 days (no credit card required). Learn more about TeacherFileBox here!
School discounts are available on 10 or more classroom subscriptions, saving 60-75% off the total cost! Learn more here.
For more reading lessons from Evan-Moor’s TeacherFileBox printables, see Helping Children Learn to Read with Phonics, Sight Words, Reading Comprehension and More!
Heather Foudy is a certified elementary teacher with over 7 years’ experience as an educator and volunteer in the classroom. She enjoys creating lessons that are meaningful and creative for students. She is currently working for Evan-Moor’s marketing and communications team and enjoys building learning opportunities that are both meaningful and creative for students and teachers alike.