Phonics Cups Literacy Game - The Imagination Tree

Make a fantastic reading resource with this phonics cups literacy game for kids! Adaptable to suit different stages of phonics development, simple and quick to put together and perfect for both classroom and home learning.

Teaching phonics is such a vital part of reading development in young children. Partnered alongside recognising “tricky” words by sight, the understanding of how graphemes make sense phonetically helps children to decode unknown words and to speed up the reading process.

I absolutely love teaching kids phonics as it lends itself to a lot of fun, hands on and whole body learning activities. This phonics cups literacy game is so cheap and quick to put together and can be adapted to be used in a range of ways, making it even more appealing to resourceful early years teachers!

[ Check out this other phonics cups on the light table activity we’ve tried too!]

Materials needed:

small paper sauce pots

cardboard packaging

black sharpie marker

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How to:

Simply turn over the paper sauce cups and write a phoneme on the back of each. Depending on the stage of the child, then make more which have digraphs on them (a digraph is when two letters are used together to represent one sound, eg SH) and then trigraphs etc.

I stuck to a complete alphabet set and all the digraphs. These were more than enough to create a wide range of words with.

Then trace around one of the cups onto cardboard to make rows of three (ready to make CVC words.)

Inside these circles write the words you wish the children to match, blend and read. It’s a good idea to make another card with blank circles so that they can create their own words too.

We started with simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant eg CAT) words and then moved onto more complicated words which involved one or more digraphs (eg SHOOT.)

She called out the sounds that she saw, searched for the matching cups, placed them on and then blended to read the words.

You can watch the video of her doing this activity here:

You could very easily extend this by building longer, more complicated words or use it to practice spelling lists sent home for homework.

Now we have discovered how lovely and tactile it is to move around these small paper cups we’ve since made some number learning games too which I will share on here when I get a chance!

These are also lovely as a resource because they stack so neatly inside each other and can be kept on a shelf in the cupboard for a future activity. I tend to put these types of resource inside a zip-loc bag now otherwise we inevitably lose one piece!

If you loved this phonics cups literacy game then you should visit the PLAYFUL LITERACY archives which are bursting with FUN ways to learn to read, write and tell stories. There’s not a worksheet in sight! 🙂