Kindergarten Phonics Worksheets

There are a lot of websites offering free phonics worksheets, but when selecting good kindergarten phonics worksheet it's important to keep in mind the fact that the group your teaching is extremely young.

What that means is, don't try and throw anything too tricky into the worksheet. I'll look at some of the different kinds of worksheets that are available so that you can get some ideas for designing your own worksheets and using worksheets that are actually relevant to kindergarten students.

Letter tracing: This is where you have a dotted line spelling out a word, with the picture next to the word, and the goal of the exercise is for students to practice writing while improving their phonetic skills. For instance, they might trace out the words for bat, ball, and basket. This is a really good, straightforward activity.

Connect The Letter To The Correct Sound/Word: These are activities where you draw a line between a letter and the picture items that start with that letter. For instance, you'd draw a line from the letter A to the word "Apple" and the letter L to the word "Lemon". This activity is good, but takes a lot of monitoring to make sure that students are correctly connecting the letters. It's best as a homework activity, where parents can help to make sure their children are correctly connecting the letters to the words.

Letter Books: These are books that frequently use the same phonemes over and over so students can understand them (the link between a letter and the sound it makes). For instance, "Baby bear bounced balls".

These books are really good, especially if you have the book as a colouring book that you can fill out together. Here's a good activity: say the sound like "b says...buh buh, ball" and then students race to colour in their balls in their workbook. You can hang these up after and everyone will have fun.

Find the mistake: These activities are terrible for young kids. An example might be, cross out the word that doesn't begin with the right letter, or correct the misspelled word. I know, seems like common sense, but I've seen some teachers try to teach young children using these kind of word sheets which are just ridiculously confusing for young learners.

Crosswords: Excellent for 7 year olds, rough for kindergarten kids. Search "crossword generator" on Google and you can build your own crossword. Older students really like this; younger students would be a no go.