8 Pre-Phonics Games to Get Kids Playing With Words and Sounds

It can be tempting to jump straight into phonics at the start of the preschool year. There’s often pressure to get children reading quickly, and phonics can feel like the obvious starting point. When we think about teaching children how to read, phonics is often the first thing that comes to mind: sounds, letters, blending, and segmenting. But in my experience, if we skip the early stages and move too quickly into learning letters and sounds, without building listening and speaking skills first, children can struggle when it comes to learning how to read.

In my classroom, I don’t rush straight into phonics, and that’s very intentional. Before we even start talking about letter sounds, blending, or segmenting, I focus on building strong pre-phonics skills. Because when children have a strong foundation in speaking and listening, their grasp of phonics comes much more naturally, and learning how to read becomes much easier.

One of the most important areas is phonological awareness. This is a child’s ability to notice the sound spoken in words. This includes things like the following:

• Listening and attention
• Talking and developing vocabulary
• Singing songs and nursery rhymes
• Clapping syllables
• Beginning to blend sounds orally

As early years practitioners, we don’t need to choose between developing language and preparing children for phonics. We need to make space for both. And we need to be careful that pre-phonics doesn’t become “phonics before phonics”—another formal skill that children are expected to demonstrate. We don’t need to make everything look like “school” in order for children to learn.

The key for me is keeping it playful and low-pressure. These are not formal lessons, but short, engaging moments that fit naturally into our day. They don’t require lots of preparation, and they certainly don’t need worksheets. In fact, some of our best learning happens when children don’t even realize they’re learning.

Greg Bottrill, author of Can I Go and Play Now?, has a fantastic approach to early education that I try to emulate in my classroom. He puts a strong emphasis on play, storytelling, being silly with words, and allowing children to experience the joy of learning. Children need lots of opportunity to play with language before they are expected to formally read and write. We can be intentional with literacy and still allow children to imagine, play, talk, laugh, and be children.

Pre-Phonics Games

Here are some of my class’s favorite pre-phonics games, inspired by this philosophy.

Silly soup. Have a selection of items available and a cauldron and spoon. Chant the song: “I’m making lots of silly soup, I’m making soup that’s silly. I’m going to put it in the fridge to make it nice and chilly.” Choose a child to pick an item to put into the pot to stir. Repeat the rhyme, each time encouraging the children to add a new item in and repeat what is already in the pot. My class favorite is making a soup with a snake, stinky socks, sausages, and strawberries. This can also be changed to have items that rhyme.

Silly word shop. Set up a pretend shop where everything has a silly name. “Today we sell wibble wobbles, flaffy fluffs, and springy sprongs!” You can enhance this by asking children to say their order in a silly (or quiet or loud) voice, seeing if they can come up with a new item or asking what they think a wibble wobble looks like.

What’s that sound? I collect a selection of recordings and encourage the children to guess what’s making the sound that I play for them. Recordings can include things like jingling keys, scrunching paper, zipping, and pouring water. We have also recorded each of the children saying hello to see if they can identify which one of them is speaking. This is a wonderful activity to encourage concentration and listening.

The gobbledegook monster. Using a puppet monster, make the monster mispronounce words (“Look, it’s a tar!”), and encourage the children to correct him (“No, it’s a car!”). Children love to be the expert!

Go on a listening walk. We take time to just stop and listen. This might be outside during playtime or even walking down the corridor. I’ll ask, “What can you hear?” and we’ll pause to notice. I then extend their thinking and listening by asking follow-up questions: What was the loudest sound? What was the quietest? Which sound was closest? Farthest away?

Play with rhyme. Nursery rhymes are an easy and enjoyable way to develop children’s awareness of sounds, and making up silly rhymes is a fun way to encourage them to play with words. A great poetry book that really helps children see the fun in rhyming and making up nonsense is Zim Zam Zoom!, by James Carter.

Clap the syllables. I introduce syllables as the “beats” in a word. We use the children’s names to get started and then move on to objects around the classroom.

Oral blending. Oral blending is a lovely way of beginning to prepare children for what they will eventually do in phonics. Instead of showing the children letters, say “Can you find the c-u-p?” They listen to the sounds and blend them together to work out the word. The important thing is that children are hearing the sounds as part of meaningful language rather than simply repeating them because an adult has asked them to.

Children who have had lots of exposure to pre-phonics experiences tend to grasp phonemic concepts much more easily. They’re not overwhelmed, because they already understand that words are made up of sounds and they’ve been playing with those sounds for weeks or even months.

By investing time in speaking, listening, and phonological awareness, we are giving children the tools they need to succeed.