Use these phase 4 phonics games to help your pupils master blending and segmenting words. The full instructions are in the download.
Phase 4 phonics games
Speedy read
This reading race involves reading all the words on a list as many times as possible, in one minute. Pupils
join in together at the same time.
Tracking activity
This activity works like a word search. Pupils will practise tracking from left to right, working along letters until they find particular words.
Hide the words
This is a memory game. Pupils need to look closely and concentrate to remember different words that you’ve removed from a set.
Guess the missing letter
This is another memory game. You’ll remove part of a word and children need to work out what part of the word is missing.
Teaching phase 4 phonics
Phase 4 phonics can feel trickier to teach than phonics phases 2 and 3, because there are no new letter-sound correspondences (grapheme-phoneme correspondences) to learn.
This is a teaching phase designed to consolidate and build on all previous learning, challenging children to read longer words, and a larger bank of tricky words, ‘at a glance’.
Put simply, phase 4 phonics is all about building children’s confidence and capacity to read more words.
They will be applying these in slightly longer sentences, using the letter-sound correspondences that they already know.
Emma Spiers is an author, early literacy consultant and trainer. Follow her on Twitter @learningladyUK and see more of her work at learninglady@co.uk. Read more of Emma’s thoughts about phase 4 phonics. Browse more SPaG games.
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