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25 phonemic awareness games

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Your young learners will love this set of simple board games that build phonemic awareness!

phonemic awareness games

Phonemic awareness.

What does it mean, anyway?

It’s a scary-sounding phrase, but it’s really not that complicated. It has to do with hearing and manipulating sounds in words. While some phonemic awareness activities may be used alongside letters, most of them don’t.

If you ask a child to tell you the beginning sound of sandwich, and s/he says sssss, that’s great! Isolating beginning sounds is one key component of phonemic awareness – and it’s exactly what we’re going to focus on with this set of games.

phonemic awareness game

We have six children, and our oldest four developed phonemic awareness without a lot of intentionality on my part. I read to them often, and we did a variety of early learning activities – but I didn’t have to explicitly teach phonemic awareness. For all of them (now 10, 9, 7, and 5) phonemic awareness just came.

This hasn’t been true of my Three (almost four). Thankfully, she’s catching on with the playful activities and games that I’ve been sharing over the past few months.

phonemic awareness game

How to play the games

  • Print and cut apart the dot cards at the end of the file.
  • Grab playing pieces.
  • Take turns moving along the board by drawing a dot card and moving that number of spaces.
  • When you land on a space, say the picture’s name and its beginning sound.

Looking for phonemic awareness games? Use this set of 25 games to help learners identify beginning sounds in words!

When my Three landed on a picture, she often stretched that initial sound instead of isolating it. For example, “Milk. Mmmmmilk.” Or “Sandwich. Ssssandwich.” Fine by me! My goal was for her to hear and identify that beginning sound – and she was doing it!

phonemic awareness game

Sometimes she was frustrated and didn’t want to try. Tiger was hard for her. Can you guess why?

It’s because /t/ is not a continuous sound. Mmmmmmm and Sssssss were the other two sounds featured in the first game and were much easier.

When she hit a roadblock, she told me to do it. So I did.

“Hmm… is it /m/?  Mmm, mmm, miger! No? Is it /g/? /G/, /g/, geiger?” After I was a little silly she was ready to get back in the game.

Looking for phonemic awareness games? Use this set of 25 games to help learners identify beginning sounds in words!

I chose to use those dot cards because my Three isn’t real quick at knowing the dots on a die yet. Another reason is that it’s a short game board. If your learner rolls a six three times, the game is over!

The dot cards gave her just enough turns without a single game overwhelming her.

phonemic awareness game

After we played one game, she was willing to play one more. Each game adds a new letter’s sound and bumps one sound off. So for example, the first game featured the sounds of m, s, and t. The second game features the sounds of s, t, and a.

phonemic awareness game

I would say that she isolated (or stretched) the beginning sound correctly about 75% of the time. By the time we were finishing (after about 5-10 minutes), she was tired and gave up quickly. Ax (pictured above) was too hard.

So what do you think? Will these work for your learners? I hope you enjoy the 25 free games you can get in the download. These games come in color, but feel free to print in grayscale if you’d like.

Get your free phonemic awareness games!

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

BUILD A STRONG READING FOUNDATION

Phonemic Awareness Games & Activities

$24.00

The research is in! Children with a strong foundation of phonemic awareness become better readers. Our bundle is your one-stop shop for teaching all levels of this important skill.

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62 Comments

  1. Mariaelena

    I love all of your resources, but I’m having a difficult time printing these games, “Say the Sound”. I’ve downloaded them without a problem, however, when I tried printing them the game board is printed with a black background rather the white. Do you know why I might be having this issue?

    Reply to this comment

  8. Mary

    I work with a 7 y.o. child who is intellectually disabled ..these cards are great and reinforcing which sounds. I love the dot cards as they are different than a dice and as 3 is the highest number the game doesn’t go too quickly. Plus she gets to reinforce her number recognition counting the dots.

    Love all the letter resources they are really helpful.

    Reply to this comment

  9. Sylvia

    Your good work is going round the globe to meet the needs of our young generation. Your freebies have been useful to me and my kids in school here in Nigeria. You are really amazing. Love you.

    Reply to this comment

  10. Peggy Henry

    Thank you so much!! I have enjoyed so many of your ideas and activities. Thanks for sharing your talent through your activities. I share your website address with my friends, so they can see all your wonderful materials, and ideas. Thanks Peg

    Reply to this comment

  13. Lori

    I just have to tell you how happy your freebies make me!! I work for a non-profit educational program to help get at-risk 4-year-olds become ready for kindergarten. We have incorporated SO MANY of your free worksheets and activities in our lessons! Thank you so much for sharing your hard work! It is truly appreciated!

    Reply to this comment

  14. Debbie Phillips

    You are so generous! I am an ESL teacher in a very poor school . I just had a 1st grade teacher ask me for R controlled vowel sounds to help a kiddo. THEN I had a Kindergarten teacher ask me to work with her kiddos on phonics SOUNDs. YEP this does the trick !!
    Thank you
    Debbie Phillips
    Racine, WI

    Reply to this comment

  19. Dawn Welke

    Thank you for all of your resources. I teach in a one room school and have a third grader that came to us recently but must have missed some important reading skills. She struggles with her reading. So, I am going to go back and use some of your resources and see if we can’t get her the things she needs to be a successful reader.

    Reply to this comment

  20. Kate Richmond

    First I wanted to say thank you for all your awesome resources. My son loves them and looks forward to working with me daily. I also just wanted to make you aware that I believe there may be a mistake of game board #5. There is a photo of what looks like an Ax or Hatchet and the letters for this game are d,m & p. According to the picture key it should be a dot. I just had my son identify the letter it did start with and we moved on with no issue but I wanted you to be aware. Thanks again for all you do.

    Reply to this comment

  21. Sheena

    I can’t thank you enough for sharing these resources with everyone. I work with Deaf and Hard of Hearing students and these have been fantastic. They are engaging, visual and help me teach difficult concept for students that are getting used to hearing the sounds. (some have not have the benefit of hearing these sounds from birth) . Plus with these activities being free I am able to incorporate many different activities into my sessions when I have no real budget for resources – Thanks : )

    Reply to this comment

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