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Build Student Vocabulary

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Games and Activities to Build Student Vocabulary | Scholastic

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Put your reference books to help students power-up their vocabulary with games and activities that make the most of dictionary skills, idioms, antonyms, and synonyms.

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Spelling Words Practice

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Our phonemic awareness games are simple to use and fun to play.
Just read the rules below, and click on the printable link to get started on one of our fun, easy-to-use games.

Letter Lane Free Phonics Game

Skills: Beginning consonant sounds: b, d, f, m
Grade level: preK-1
Players: 2-3
Objective: Be the first player to reach END
Supplies: Printable game board, answer key, and cards; one marker for each player

Preparation: Print the board, key and cards. Laminate and cut apart. Shuffle the cards and place them face down on the table. Review the name for each with the players.
Printable Rules
To play:

1. Players put their markers on START.

2. The first player draws the top card. He moves his marker to the first picture with the same beginning sound. For example, if he draws M, he moves to the mushroom. He puts his card face down in a discard pile. The other players continue in the same manner.

3. When a player draws the duck or the fish (the cards with no letters), he moves his marker to that space, even if he must move backwards.

4. If no one has reached END when the game cards run out, shuffle, restack, and reuse them.

5. To move into the END space a player must draw D or F.

6. The first player to END is the winner of the round.

More Phonemic Awareness Games

We know that the best spellers are usually kids who start early to develop good phonics skills. We have several games on our site to help you help your child develop these skills, including the one on this page. There's no reading required.

Picture This - short vowel sounds

Picture Perfec t - long vowel sounds

More Early Learning Resources

If you enjoyed our phonemic awareness games, we think you'll also like some of these:

ABC Phonics Poem - A fun and funny way to learn about initial sounds!

Alphabet Phonics Booklet - Students customize their own pages in this A to Z phonics activity.

Phonics Printables - 2 super-simple worksheets for beginners, featuring the letters b, c, d, f, g, and h as initial consonants

Phonics Worksheet - Here's more practice with initial consonants. This page features j, k and l.

Rhyme Time Two cute printables to give early learners practice in identifying rhyming words with short and long vowel sounds.

Lots of Leaves! - Students will discern long and short vowel phonics sounds as they complete this appealing page.

Short vowel Worksheets - 5 easy worksheets to practice the short vowel sounds for a, e, i, o and u.

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Fun Phonemic Awareness Games Help to Teach Basic Phonics

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Our phonemic awareness games are simple to use and fun to play. Just read the rules below, and click on the printable link to get started on one of our fun, easy-to-use games.

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Vowel Team Group Activity

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Howdy partner! Are your kids ready for some vowel teams review? This western theme word work activity is an engaging way to get some practice in.

One of the most fun things about living in Texas is the cowboy culture. The rodeo comes to town every year, and out past the suburbs men wear cowboy hats in complete seriousness. At rodeo time, kids have "Go Texan" day at school - they wear cowboy boots and hats, big belt buckles, and just generally look adorable.

My kids also love putting their cowboy and cowgirl hats on to play. It's fun to pretend to twirl a lasso and ride a horse.

Western Theme Vowel Teams Activity

Vowel teams are groups of letters that get pronounced as a single vowel sound. They form one of six syllable types in our language that kids need to practice as they learn phonics.

Once you've taught the sounds individually, you can review them all together. I've chosen 8 vowel teams for this western theme activity: ai, ay, oe, oa, ue, ie, ee, ea.

Kids can pretend they're cowboys and cowgirls spinning a lasso. They start by flicking the spinner to rope a vowel team. Then they find that team on the word list page, and choose a word. Next, they read the word, and then write it down on the recording sheet.

Vowel Teams Activity Preparation

For the spinner, you can use one from the teacher store, use a paperclip and pencil, or try my DIY version. I used a piece of plastic cut from a strawberry container. I was careful to round the sharp edges as I cut. Then, I colored it with an orange Sharpie pen and punched a hole in the end. I attached it to the spinner with a brad.

After printing, you may also like to laminate the spinner page and the word list. You can give the kids a dry erase pen to cross out words they've already chosen - everything is always more fun when you get to use a dry erase pen!

I hope your kids will find this an engaging way to practice reading and spelling words with vowel teams.

Grab Your Copy

Ready to saddle up and practice vowels? Grab your copy of the Vowel Team Activity by clicking the blue button below! Then, hop on over and try this Fine Motor Literacy Sight Word Activity.

More Reading Resources
27 Awesome Sight Word Activities Gumdrop Color Words Sight Words

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Western Theme Vowel Teams Activity with Free Printable

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Howdy partner! Are your kids ready for some vowel teams review? This western theme word work activity is an engaging way to get some practice in. One of the most fun things about living in Texas is the cowboy culture. The rodeo comes to town every year, and out past the suburbs men wear cowboy hats in complete seriousness.

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Syllable Games

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As students progress in their literacy understanding, they move from reading and writing single syllable words (often with consonant-vowel-consonant constructions) to reading and writing multisyllabic words. Instruction focused on teaching students about syllables often focuses on teaching different…

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Vowel Team Review

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Guided Reading;

Meet with teachers and leveled group

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Phonemic awareness game

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This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Your young learners will love this set of simple board games that build phonemic awareness!
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.

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 cam e.

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.

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.

How to play the games
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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

BUILD A STRONG READING FOUNDATION

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If you have learners who struggle to isolate beginning sounds, these free phonemic awareness games are the perfect fit! Use them in preschool or kindergarten. Use them in literacy centers or small groups. #phonemicawareness #preschool #kindergarten

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Toby The Tiger Reading Story Consonant T Pronunciation

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Award-winning reading solution with thousands of leveled readers, lesson plans, worksheets and assessments to teach guided reading, reading proficiency and comprehension to K-5 students

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Dipthong -XML Fill in

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IXL | Complete the word with the correct diphthong: oi, oy, ou, ow | 2nd grade language arts

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Improve your language arts knowledge with free questions in "Complete the word with the correct diphthong: oi, oy, ou, ow" and thousands of other language arts skills.

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Flash Cards to learn words;

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Download and print flash cards from the Dolch, Fry, and Top 150 Written Words lists, or make your own Custom Sight Words Flash Cards. The cards are available in three sizes full-page (1-up); half-page (2-up); and quarter-page (4-up). We recommend printing the flash cards on card-stock paper, to make the cards stiffer and more durable.

Write your own words into these blank sight words flash cards. Download (PDF)

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Write your own words into these blank sight words flash cards. Download (PDF)

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Write your own words into these blank sight words flash cards. Download (PDF)

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Q: Why is there an arrow under each word in the flash cards? A: The arrow serves multiple purposes. It reminds teachers to place their index finger on the circle and move it from left to right under the word to lead the student's eye across the word. The arrow also helps students orient the flash card and helps them remember to read from left to right. Q: How do I hold the flash cards? A: Hold the flash card so that it is directly in front of your child at your child's eye level. When you move your finger across the arrow, make sure that it does not obstruct your child's view of the word as this distracts attention from the words. Q: The flash cards don't print correctly - why do they go over the edge of the paper? A: The one-to-a-page and four-to-a-page flash cards need to be printed in landscape. To do this, go to your printer settings and select "landscape" (not portrait). ↑ Top
These materials are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Essentially, this means you can do whatever you want with the resources, provided you leave the attribution hallmark on the resources. You may use these materials in the classroom, at home, as part of a for-profit tutoring business, or for any other purpose. You do not need to contact us for permission to use the materials. We want you to use them!

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Download and print flash cards from the Dolch, Fry, and Top 150 Written Words lists, or make your own Custom Sight Words Flash Cards. The cards are available in three sizes full-page (1-up); half-page (2-up); and quarter-page (4-up). We recommend printing the flash cards on card-stock paper, to make the cards stiffer and more durable.

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Do Prefix worksheet ; click on

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Practice Vowels and Short O Journey’s Workbook pgs. 40-44

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Practice Vowel long O and Journey’s Workbook, pgs.36-40

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Group Activity-Watch Scratch Garden video to see and learn syllable/words

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Syllables : See Picture/Listen to Word/How Many Syllables Are There (Visual/Audio Worksheet)

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IXL brings 2nd grade language arts to life! Set students up for success with thousands of skills that challenge learners at just the right level.

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Dipthong Practice-Go To Verbal

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IXL | Choose the diphthong word that matches the picture | 2nd grade language arts

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Improve your language arts knowledge with free questions in "Choose the diphthong word that matches the picture" and thousands of other language arts skills.

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Consonant Practice-go to

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Rock and Learn: Long Vowels

Learn phonics rules for making long vowel sounds with fun songs. Practice reading words. Phonics skills helps boost

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Long Vowels | Phonics for Learning to Read

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Identify short and long vowels-Sort short and long vowel words; letter ‘i”.

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IXL brings 2nd grade language arts to life! Set students up for success with thousands of skills that challenge learners at just the right level.

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Know spelling-sound correspondences for common vowel teams; ‘ea’  sounding like ‘ seam.’ Do pp.21-22 in Journey Spelling workbook.