Being an EFL teacher, I pay special attention to
teaching phonics to my students. Unlike native speakers, the kids who study English as a foreign language are not fully emerged into the language so they have a hard time figuring out how to pronounce many English words correctly. And we all know how crazy the English phonetics can be. When I show my students how the letter
o can make as many as 9 sounds in different words or introduce the letter combination
ou in such words as
soup, mouse, shoulder, couple, four, flour, journalist, carousel with 8 different pronunciations, they get a little bit puzzled. No wonder English phonics are often a major challenge for EFL and ESL students. That’s why I design all sorts of
printable phonics worksheets,
charts,
flash cards,
posters, and games to help my young students learn phonics in a fun and memorable manner.
I have recently designed a printable board game for my English classes dedicated to phonics. The purpose of the game is to help young English learners memorize basic phonics rules, exceptions and some tricky words as well as to correctly identify sounds and tell the difference between them. I designed 15 different game boards to play with more than 550 word cards.