Early Phonics Fun!

Whilst teaching early years in a specialist school I often overlooked phonics, and especially early phonics skills, as an important phase in the children’s curriculum as there always seemed to be so much else to teach particularly along the lines of early communication, self-care and social interaction skills.

However, early phonics skills such as being able to listen and identify sounds, also correlate well with the development of joint attention and receptive language skills.  If children are unable to identify different sounds in their environment and pay attention to them when appropriate it will be very difficult for them to respond to their name and verbal instructions.

A fun way to teach these early listening and response skills can be sound bingo!

Playing different sounds to children through the interactive whiteboard or using communication switches and asking them to identify the sounds using objects or symbols can turn a simple listening activity into a fun game. 

There is an amazing website, http://soundbible.com, where you can download short sound effects for free.  If you download them in .wav format they are then super easy to insert into a power point or to just play from your computer.

Here is a simple sound bingo board game I developed for children in my nursery class, have a go and feel free to add sounds and make the bingo boards different for each child so that it turns into more of a competition!