Spin a Letter Sound: Easy, Fun, Free Phonics Game

Inside: Spinner game freebies for teaching beginning letter sounds.

Teaching children how to differentiate sounds within words is an important early literacy skill.

Learning beginning letter sounds often starts in preschool but it’s not unusual to have children enter kindergarten and sometimes grade 1 without a full understanding of these early skills.

No worries! Everyone learns at different rates and of course it’s our job, as teachers, to accommodate those different levels.

Some tips to remember when teaching beginning sounds:

1. Be consistent: A little bit of frequent practice is more effective and more fun than infrequent and long sessions.
2. Teach only a few letters at a time: Don’t overwhelm your students with too many letters at once. Some teachers like to introduce a letter a day. As a first grade teacher I prefer to teach 4 new letter sounds a week.
3. Use visuals: Pairing letter sounds with pictures helps make stronger and faster connections.

After children can distinguish beginning sounds, move to end sounds, then medial sounds.

Letter Sound Spinner Game

Most children love to learn through games. So I’ve made up a set of spinners that feature beginning sounds from a to z.

Here’s a sample page from the set:

To play this game:

1. Use a pencil tip to hold a paper clip in the centre of the spinner
2. Spin the paper clip.
3. Say the word aloud, e.g., “sun”
4. Isolate the beginning sound, e.g., “ss”
5. Print the corresponding letter,  e.g., “s”. Print the letter only once.
6. Spin again and repeat until all 16 spaces are filled in.

You can grab the entire set for FREE!

If you’d like to make your own letter sound games, posters or flash cards, you may want to purchase the clip art I used for the spinner game.

Actually, the set below is a little bit different because after I made the clip art for the games, I decided to add more detail to some of the images.

You can see them below.

You can also see them in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Thanks for stopping by!