Are you supporting your child to read at home using Phonics? Or are you a teacher who’s after some more ideas on how to make Phonics engaging?

We’ve been searching for the best phonics toys, books and learning resources. These are our current favourites:

• Phonics Bloom– If you are looking for online, interactive phonics games we’d highly recommend this website. These fun, bright coloured games are designed by parents and teachers to support children learning to read and write. My children found the games amusing and genuinely enjoyed playing them. There’s a huge range of levels of phonics covered in this game, starting with level 1 distinguishing sounds. See our detailed review here.

• Learning Resources Hot Dots Let’s Learn! Phonics My children love this resource. It comes complete with 3 (varying difficulty) books and a funny, talking pen. Children press the pen on the correct answer dot and it tell them if they have got the answer right. Questions include distinguishing the correct phoneme at the start, middle and end of a word. Fantastic resource for children that like a bit of independence in their learning.
  
• Read with Biff, Chip and Kipper Phonics and Story 12 Book Pack sold by Books2Door. Biff, Chip and Kipper have become almost synonymous with learning to read, and for good reason. Their simple, yet engaging texts and colourful illustrations make them ideal for beginner readers.  The 12 pack by Books2Door mean there’s plenty of level 4 and 5 stories for children to enjoy.

• Make Believe Ideas Reading with Phonics Fairy Tales– We are a little bit in love with these sparkly books covering the favourite Fairy Tales. The stories are exciting and funny, but what makes them extra special is how each book has a different letter sound to focus on. Throughout the book they include the key letter sound regularly and highlight it within words in a red font colour. Fantastic for children who are getting more confident with Phonics and will relish being stretched to perfect all the phonemes.

• Phonics 44 Sounds Wall Poster by TTS If you are in need of a phonics poster at school or at home, this brightly coloured large Sounds Wall Poster which is linked to the Letters and Sounds, is great. It has wonderful, child friendly images to accompany each sound. It is also cleverly split into each phonics phase by differing colours.

• Therapy Box Phonics Apps–  Finding good quality, educational Apps for Smart Devices can feel a bit like a mine field. We’ve been trying out 4 of Therapy Box’s Phonics Apps Phonics Keyboard, My Phonics Flashcards , Phonics Spelling Dictionary and Rhyming Bus and can highly recommend them. My children have thoroughly enjoyed and learnt from each of them with their bright coloured animations, clear speech and funny sounds.

• Carter’s Yard Phonics Flash Cards– Augmented reality, ‘talking’ flash cards – the future of learning phonics perhaps? Find out more about these clever phonics flash cards and see how they work in our detailed review here

• Reading Together 8 Fairytale Phonic Books – We adore these Phonic Activity books. They are based on traditional fairy tales and are brilliant for keeping children engaged in learning phonics. For example, children can listen to grown-ups reading the book and emphasising the sounds, practise sounding out the highlighted sounds together and complete fun activities such as forming the words using stickers.

• Twinkl Phonics Resources– We are big fans of Twinkl and their teaching resources. They have a wide range of brilliant phonics resources to help support children’s learning at every stage of learning to read and write. We particularly recommend their CVC Word and Picture Matching Activity Sheets– which do ‘what they say on the tin’, children are encouraged to sound out and read simple CVC words (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words like C-A-T)then match them to the correct picture.

• Imagine That Publishing I Can Do It – Phonics Fun with Words

These books are excellent. Each page focuses on a phoneme. There’s a short story at the start of each page including key words with the phoneme. Then the child has to look at the pictures below and identify the key word, sound it out and try and write it (using the wipe clean pen) on the page. They can the pull the card at the bottom of the page to check their spelling! Very interactive and great for children who like to learn with some independence!

• Get Set Go Phonics Flashcards: Build a Word and Sight Words. These great quality sets of 100 flash cards are fantastic for helping develop children’s confidence in learning Phonics. Children can use them to practise pronouncing phonemes, building their own words and use the Sight Words cards to help learn tricky words. The cards incorporate clever features such as raised text that children can feel and colour coding to differentiate the cards.

Please note for the purpose of this blog post we were sent review copies. This post also contains Amazon Affiliate Links. For more information see our About Me page.