Teaching Phonics Checklists

The Hand In Hand Teaching Phonics Checklists packet is designed to support parents in guiding their children in becoming successful and independent readers – without using a formal curriculum. Teaching Phonics Checklists blend 50+ years of research-based best reading instruction practices with play-based activities. As you use this resource, you’ll develop your own understanding about how children learn to read. The more you know about the science of reading, the more empowered and confident you’ll be in creating natural reading activities throughout your day.

The Hand In Hand Teaching Phonics Checklists packet provides you with essential information and charts to help you organize phonics activities you can explore with your child. This packet includes:

1. Phoneme Chart: 44 sounds made by the American-English language, along with common letter combinations that make those sounds
2. Phonics Sequence Checklist: Comprehensive list of phonics skills, charted by grade level
3. Word Family Checklist: List of 98 words families
4. Magic E Word Checklist: List of 61 CVC and CVCC words that transform to long vowel words
5. Sight Word Checklist: List of 190+ most commonly taught sight words
6. Phonics Activities: Bank of 40+ play-based activities you can easily use with your children. All activities are no- to low-prep and are free or low-cost to make.
7. Reading Milestones Checklist: General target reading behaviors, mastered by grade level
8. Reading Miscue Chart: Examples of typical oral reading errors and what they may mean

Whether you count yourself as an unschooler OR you simply aim to make your homeschooling more child-focused and less textbook reliant, I know you’ll count the Teaching Phonics Checklists as a must have resource.

Save even more time and money by purchasing my discounted phonics bundle, which includes:

• This Teaching Phonics Checklists packet
• Elkonin Phonemic Awareness Task Cards
• 66 Short Vowel Word Sliders
• Reading Comprehension Rubric

NOTE: This Teaching Phonics Checklists packet does NOT provide you with an exhaustive list of phonics activities for every phonics objective you will need to teach. With 40+ suggested play-based activities, however, you have loads of ideas to get you started on your reading adventure. Please see the Preview file for more information about what the packet contains.

With a master’s degree in education from Johns Hopkins University, focusing on curriculum development and educational assessments, I have written a reading instruction course for a Maryland community college. The course, approved by the Maryland State Department of Education, provides continuing education credit to childcare providers wanting to learn more about play-based reading instruction techniques. The course has also been offered as a full unschooling reading class for homeschool parents. In addition to homeschooling my own children from kindergarten into college, I have worked as a private homeschool portfolio reviewer for families in Maryland and Virginia for 18+ years. I have seen first-hand reading outcomes for hundreds of children using all kinds of curricula and all types of unschooling approaches.

Just as importantly, while the primary purpose of Hand In Hand Teaching Phonics Checklists packet is to support your goal of teaching your child to read, the activities are meant to foster a sense of joy in the reading process. Research tells us that kids who associate reading as a form of entertainment, rather than just a functional skill, wind up with overall higher academic achievement later on in their schooling years. Rather than spend hours sitting at a desk completing countless worksheets, Teaching Phonics Checklists offers you and your child a chance to move around and laugh and build happy memories while learning to read. Your child will forever hold onto these warm and loving memories whenever they pick up a book. Rather than seeing reading as a chore to get through so you don’t get yelled at, they’ll view reading as something special.