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I refuse to spend this intro talking about my love affair for quesadillas, when all you want is the quesadilla recipe. So, instead of waxing poetically about cheap things, here’s the list of free and cheap phonics and phonemic awareness resources. And I promise they’re good.
Sound decks are a tool I use with every group, every single day. And I’m giving you one of my most powerful tools FOR FREE because I sincerely want all teachers to have access to this resource that can help elevate your instruction.
Sound decks are essentially like alphabet flash cards you would use with your kindergarteners. These are elevated, however, because they don’t stop with individual letters. Included are 136 different graphemes, ranging from the basic alphabet, vowel teams, syllable divisions, r-controlled vowels, “welded” sounds, blends, and more.
If you’re looking for more information on how I use them, I have a free training on my You Tube channel. Yes they are no strings attached free because I think they are that powerful!
I hate homework. It seems unfair to me that children spend 7 hours a day at school just to come home and have to work more. And if you are a struggling kiddo, it’s even worse. But I know that some places are required to give homework, and often parents want something to do to help their child. I made these phonemic awareness calendars to make homework as painless as possible.
Every day the calendar asks students to do an activity that takes less than a minute. They may be asked to segment, blend, delete phonemes, count words in a sentence, etc. There’s even a QR code that takes parents to a short video to explain the different activities.
I update these calendars yearly, so go ahead and download for free and help making homework as painless as possible!
The research around phonemic awareness indicates this: it is the segmenting and blending of phonemes that will take our students the furthest. I created these lists because I didn’t have access to anything that was useful for just the segmenting and blending. All the resources I owned were a combination of segmenting, blending, adding, and deleting. I just wanted segmenting and blending resources.
So, I’ve created 38 different phoneme lists with 2, 3, 4, and 5 phonemes. These phoneme lists are intended to be used as a quick, oral-only activity in your classroom. They are a great warm-up before a phonics lesson. The lists are organized by phonemes (sounds), not graphemes (spelling patterns). That is why you will see words that children cannot typically spell at this stage.
I could teach reading with blank paper, pencils, and a few decodables. But sometimes there are things that just make your life so much easier and that make teaching a skill more concrete. That is where these sound-symbol mapping sheets come into play.
Included are 5 sheets to be used with any words. Students will practice identifying the number of sounds in a word, blocking off the correct number of squares, and then writing the correct sounds in the boxes. One box = one sound! I also included 3 completed versions so you can see how different phonics patterns are mapped!
I love sound-symbol mapping sheets because they allow my students to see sound-symbol correspondences. With sound-symbol mapping, it takes away some of the seemingly arbitrary nature of the English language.
Parents can be our greatest ally in education, but parents did not go to college to become teachers. We cannot and we should not expect them to know the difference between phonemes, morphemes, and graphemes. At the end of the day, most parents want to know one single thing: what can I do to help my child become a better reader?
That’s where the parent letters come in. These parent letters are organized around a variety of topics, including: phonemic awareness, spelling, handwriting, learning sounds, heart words, and decodable texts. There’s also a Spanish translation available.
My parent letters explain concepts in simple ways, followed by actions parents can take to help their children.
I love games, but I realized that all of the games I owned were at the word level. If we want proficient readers, we MUST get them reading at the sentence level. So, I made decodable sentences games to give students the practice they need. My CVC decodable sentence game is completely free, and the bundle with all 8 games is only $10.50!
I love the idea of sentence anagrams/sentence building. The issue I was seeing was that all of the sentence building activities had cute themes like summer or Christmas but were full of words my kids couldn’t actually read!
So I thought—why not make sentence building activities that could work on sentence structure, while also ensuring they were decoding. Decodable sentence building was born. This product includes 10 sentences each of sentences focusing on CVC, digraphs, blends, and magic e. There’s even two versions of the sentences: one has a heart over heart words, and the other does not.)
This board game is easy enough that you can teach your students to play it in under 2 minutes and then add to centers! It is also perfect for one-on-one tutoring.
Players take turns flipping over a picture. They look at the picture, say the word, and identify the number of sounds in the word (For example: key has two sounds, /k/ and /e/). The player will move forward that many spaces.
This game is easy, effective, and fun!
Please note, this game may not be appropriate at the very beginning of kindergarten. Students do not have to read any words, but the images include things like digraphs and blends, which are more difficult to identify the sounds.
Two years ago, I wanted to send games home with my intervention students. Every game I could print, however, needed several pages printed. With over 60 kiddos in intervention, this didn’t seem feasible. So, I set out to create games that were easy to play, easy on a budget, and easy on the printer.
These roll and read games were my solution. They couldn’t be simpler: roll a dice and read the next word in the row. Whoever reads the final word in a row gets a point. The person with the most points wins!
11 games are included for $4. I love putting them inside of a dry-erase pocket from the Dollar Store so that students can play them again and again!
There is no single scope and sequence that is correct, let’s start there. In general, we move from CVC words, into thing like digraphs and blends before moving onto different vowel variations. But, research has not shown any single sequence to be more effective than another. As long as the scope is systematic, includes the most important graphemes, and the teacher continues to review, they are in a good place.
Use my free phonics scope and sequence as a starting point for your instruction. If your county is trying to make a sequence, take this and change it how you see fit for your students. You may not want to include everything, and there may be some skills you want to add. Just remember to make sure it is systematic and that all the big phoneme-grapheme correspondences are targeted!
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Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.
Savannah Campbell is a K-5 reading specialist. She has taught her entire 12-year teaching career at the school she went to as a child. She holds two master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary. Savannah is both Orton-Gillingham and LETRS trained. Her greatest hope in life is to allow all children to live the life they want by helping them to become literate individuals.
Feeling overwhelmed with all the terminology out there? Want to know the key terms all teachers need to teach phonics? In this FREE Rules of English cheat sheet, you get a 5 page pdf that takes you through the most important terms for understanding English—you’ll learn about digraphs, blends, syllable types, syllable divisions, and move. Grab today and take the stress out of your phonics prep!
