Home » Education & Career » Homeschooling on a Budget » Teaching Reading at Home: Free Phonics Worksheets and Resources

Teaching Reading at Home: Free Phonics Worksheets and Resources

© Teresa Higginbotham

Worksheets and books to teach phonics can be found for little to no cost. Two resources are your local public library and the internet.

Many phonics books include fun activities to liven up your lessons. For example, draw a house with a roof and two ladders. Write one word on each rung. The child has to say all the words going up the ladder to get on the roof. If she misses a word then go back to the bottom of the ladder and start again. Then once they get themselves on the roof they have to read the words going down the second ladder to get down.

Another fun strategy is to make art projects out of phonics words - a tree with fall leaves with words on them, Christmas trees with word ornaments, hearts or eggs in a basket, or snowflakes. Count up to your 100th day of homeschool and see if you can come up with 100 words to put on a poster. More teaching activities can be found in the following books.

Books for Teaching Phonics

Thses are taken from a list on the Multnomah County Public Libraries website.

• Phonemic Awareness Activities for Early Reading Success: Easy, Playful Activities That Help Prepare Children for Phonics Instruction
• Phonics From A to Z: A Practical Guide (Blevins)
• Hands-On Alphabet Activities for Young Children: A Whole Language Plus Phonics Approach to Reading (Brown)
• Phonics for the New Reader: Step-by-Step (Fields)
• Big Book of Phonics for Whole Language (Frischer)
• Phonics Pathways (Hiskes)
• Big Book of Phonics for Whole Language (Karwowski)
• Reading Reflex: The Foolproof Phono-Graphix Method for Teaching Your Child to Read (McGuinness)

Internet Resources for Teaching Phoics

Dolch reading list. The Dolch words are the 220 most frequently found words in books that children read, listed in order of frequency.

Alphabet Worksheets from AbcTeach. These are listed by grade level to learn basic alphabet.

Alphabet and Numbers Practice from Learning Page.com. These worksheets help the child write the alphabet.

Blends, Consonants, and Nouns Worksheets from School Express. School Express has phonics worksheets including blends.  

Tampa Reads - Worksheets for teaching all phonics and phonemic awareness skills essential for learning how to read. You can get a series of worksheets for free and then will have to move into the download for pay mode.

Scholastic also has a great page of links to many of their printables and activities. Rhyming practice, spelling worksheets, mini books to print and games.  

The copyright of the article Teaching Reading at Home: Free Phonics Worksheets and Resources in Homeschooling on a Budget is owned by Teresa Higginbotham. Permission to republish Teaching Reading at Home: Free Phonics Worksheets and Resources in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.