Whether you're a teacher or a parent (or both) this site will have something for you and your children. The games and activities are designed to help children develop their knowledge of phonics (sounds within words) and how these are represented in written form.
In order to read and write confidently children need to develop a wide range of strategies to support them in their early years at school. Phonic knowledge is an important part of this as it helps children identify the relationship between sounds and letters and to use this information to support their spelling and reading.

The games and activities on this site are divided into 5 modules which each focus on a different area of phonics work. For a detailed breakdown of the activities themselves see Site contents.

(Consonant-Vowel-Consonant Words)

This area of phonic knowledge is introduced in the Year 1 Term 1 objectives of the National Literacy Strategy's Framework for Teaching. However, these activities are suitable for schools who are not following the Strategy and for home use.

CVC words form the most reliable group when learning the relationship between letters and their sounds, although even here there are irregularities (e.g. when r is the final letter, the short vowel changes its sound).

This unit consists of:
2 interactive onscreen games (Shockwave 7)
10 Magic Pencil video clips with activity sheets
4 'Print and Do' game kits
10 activity sheets for the Literacy hour
10 activity sheets that make a 'Scrapbook'
10 'Write a poem' worksheets
8 new poems in the Teachers and Parents section

This area of phonic knowledge is introduced in the Year 1 Term 2 objectives of the National Literacy Strategy's Framework for Teaching. However, these activities are suitable for schools who are not following the Strategy and for home use.

The lesson plans and print off activities in this module focus on the 10 different groups of clusters that are covered in the new Words and Pictures Plus TV series.

This unit consists of:
1 Interactive onscreen game (Flash 4)
10 Magic Pencil video clips with activity sheets
2 'Print and Do' game kits
19 activity sheets for the Literacy hour
10 activity sheets that make a 'Scrapbook'
10 'Write a poem' worksheets
5 complete lesson plans

This area of phonic knowledge is introduced in the Year 1 Term 3 objectives of the National Literacy Strategy's Framework for Teaching. However, these activities are suitable for schools who are not following the Strategy and for home use.

Long vowel sounds are particularly difficult for children as each sound can be represented by a variety of different letter combinations (the long 'a' sound for example can be represented in at least six different ways: day, grey, eh!, great, train, gate).

This unit consists of:
10 interactive (Shockwave Flash) poem based activities
2 interactive onscreen games (Shockwave 6)
4 'Print and Do' game kits
5 sentence level activity sheets
10 activity sheets that make a 'Scrapbook'
10 Write a poem worksheets
10 complete lesson plans for the Literacy Hour
10 printable large format illustrated poems

This area of phonic knowledge is introduced in the Year 2 objectives of the National Literacy Strategy's Framework for Teaching. However, these activities are also suitable for schools who are not following the Strategy and for home use.

Vowel phonemes are notoriously difficult because many of them can be spelt in two, three or even more different ways e.g. chair, care, bear, where. As an added difficulty some words such as pear and pair, which sound exactly the same, are distinguished only by the spelling of the vowel. It is unlikely that young learners will discover these alternative spelling patterns for themselves through their own reading, so it is important for them to be given regular opportunities to see these vowel spellings in sufficient quantities for them to be able to gain familiarity with the alternative patterns.

This unit consists of:
2 Interactive onscreen games (Flash 4)
10 Magic Pencil video clips with activity sheets
2 'Print and Do' game kits
10 acivity sheets for the Literacy Hour

High Frequency words play an important part in holding together the general coherence of texts. Many of these words are irregular or have difficult spellings and because of their important grammatical function they are often difficult to predict from the surrounding text.

The National Literacy Strategy's Framework for Teaching lists approximately 200 high frequency words that pupils should be able to read on sight, in and out of context, by the end of year 2.

This unit consists of:
1 interactive onscreen game (Shockwave 7)