Phonics

Phonics is mostly an ear skill before it is an eye skill. Long before a child can decode a written word, they can hear that "cat" and "cup" start the same way, clap the beats in "el-e-phant", or tell you what rhymes with "mouse".

So these activities are games played out loud: I-spy with sounds instead of letters, silly rhyming pairs, robot talk where you say a word in separate sounds and they put it back together. They work in the car, in a queue and at bath time, and none of them need paper.

They are also the ones that make the difference when written letters do arrive. A child who can already hear the three sounds in "dog" has much less to do when they meet d-o-g on a page.