With over a thousand people a day on the phonics page alone, I feel quite a big responsibility in what I introduce there. Unfortunately quite a few teachers and parents are under the mistaken impression that phonics means “taking a letter and seeing what sound it makes”. That’s not what phonics means. Phonics actually means “here’s a sound, which symbols can we use to write it down”. It’s a subtle, but big difference.

So to help make things a little clearer I’ve put up a new phonics name game on the site. This time you hear a sound at the beginning of a word and have to click on the letter that represents that first sound. It’s the key skill for starting phonics. I’ve also used people’s names as the quiz words. This is because when we were testing the game people were saying “oh, this is far too easy, I don’t need to use this”. But it was simply because they were hearing words they already knew how to spell so were simply ignoring the phonics side of things! This time, as I’ve chosen quite a few rarer names, everybody has to really listen hard! Have a try yourself, it will really help your students: phonics name game.

PS Happy V day, Valentine’s stuff is here.