Phonic Snowballs

This is a very simple to set up and fun phonics activity that is great for toddlers, preschoolers and older kids. A key part of learning to read using phonics is being able to recall different sounds quickly. If it takes too long to remember what sound the letters makes it makes it very difficult to then blend them back together as a word. So lots of practice of looking and saying the sounds is required but this is not always the most exciting of tasks for a child. So here is a fun way to help them practice!

Set Up

So for this I used our tuff tray as we had already been using it for our snowflake pattern activity. But you could also just write the sounds of a piece of large paper or chalk on a patio or driveway. I chose a mixture of sounds, a few that I knew that my daughter knew really well and then lots that she had either recently learnt or was still confusing occasionally. I then used the wintry coloured pom poms we had also been using and it was ready.

So the game was to throw a single pom pom, watch where it landed and then to earn a point you had to say the phoneme (sound) that it had landed closest to. This fun phonics activity worked really well to help M practice her sounds and although she was a bit rusty to begin with the more we played the quicker she remembered them.

This was such an easy and fun phonics activity to set up at home for my kids. Both my toddler and older daughter enjoyed playing and it really did help to improve the recall of the sounds for my eldest. We kept this out and although the sounds got rubbed out by a very keen 2 year old. My eldest then enjoyed writing the sounds on herself.