Activities to avoid in systematic phonics lessons (yes, TPT sellers, I’m looking at you)
- Puddle Jumpers
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
“Help! I need something to keep my students busy during my phonics lessons, but I don’t want to feel guilty about wasting precious teaching time.”
If you’ve ever had that thought, you’re not alone. It’s easy to reach for “busy work” that looks cute, takes ages to prep, and quietly eats into the limited time you have for high‑quality instruction.
The problem? Many of these activities:
Take far longer to prepare than to complete
Don’t actually strengthen decoding or encoding
Can even add confusion to phonics learning
There are countless worksheets and activities marketed as “phonics practice” for lessons, centres, homework, and assessment. But how many of them are grounded in research and truly essential to your phonics sequence? A quick scroll through the top 100 UFLI products on Teachers Pay Teachers shows just how many activities fall into the “avoid” category.
Let's aim to "know better, do better!"
Below are key red flags to watch for when you’re choosing phonics activities.
1. Cutting and pasting activities
These should be minimal—if used at all.
Think about how much direct instruction time is lost to:
Cutting
Sorting
Gluing
A more efficient alternative is to present words and pictures and have students draw a line to the picture or circle a matching word. Same learning goal, far less time wasted.
Find purposeful activities in this worksheet bundle:
2. “Crack the code” activities
These activities usually ask students to:
Match a picture to a symbol or grapheme
Use that match to “reveal” a word
This doesn’t teach decoding or encoding—it teaches students to crack a puzzle system. It adds an unnecessary step between the grapheme and the phoneme. It might feel fun, but there are far better ways to build engagement without adding confusion or stealing time from explicit phonics practice.
Find engagement through repetition of word reading, try some of these activities instead:
These games offer high repetition of word reading in a fun way without time wasted! Once the students understand how to play, pair them up!
3. Word searches
Word searches do not support phonics instruction.
Students are typically asked to:
Read a list of words
Find those words hidden in a grid
But:
You can’t tell if they actually read the word correctly.
They may simply be matching letter patterns.
Words can appear forwards, backwards, up, and down, which conflicts with the left‑to‑right directionality we want to reinforce.
In short: they’re time‑consuming, hard to monitor for accuracy, and add no real value to phonics learning.
4. Vocabulary flashcards with pictures and words
When the picture and the word are shown together, students can often guess the word from the picture alone. That’s not phonics practice.
If your goal is vocabulary (not decoding), research is clear: explicit instruction must be followed by meaningful practice, not just flashing cards and definitions.
Look instead for resources that:
Help students map features of words (e.g., morphology, semantic features)
Require them to use the words in sentences and contexts
5. Color‑by‑code activities
These are also questionable for phonics.
Often, students:
Read a word once
Work out the colour
Then never need to read that word again
The colouring takes far longer than the reading. Again, that’s precious instructional time that could be spent on repeated, accurate decoding and encoding instead.
6. Cut‑and‑paste word boxes
Activities where students cut out letters and glue them into boxes to form words? Just no.
While manipulative letters are powerful for teaching blending and segmenting—because students can pull sounds apart and push them together—gluing letters down:
Removes the opportunity for ongoing manipulation
Reduces practice in letter formation
Weakens phoneme–grapheme mapping opportunities
Better options:
Loose manipulatives (letters that can be moved and reused)
Elkonin boxes with writing or movable letters
7. Sorting real vs nonsense words
Nonsense words have a very specific purpose: they’re useful in phonics assessment to check whether students are decoding rather than guessing.
But in regular class time, sorting real vs nonsense words:
Adds little instructional value
Can distract from reading meaningful, decodable text
Use nonsense words sparingly and purposefully—mainly for assessment, not as a regular activity.
8. Letter boxes shaped to grapheme size (word coffins)
Letter boxes that visually “shape” around graphemes (e.g., tall for ‘t’, short for ‘a’) encourage students to rely on word shape rather than attending to the grapheme–phoneme correspondences. This works against the goal of systematic phonics, where we want students to focus on the sounds and spellings, not the outline of the word.
Why all this matters
Systematic phonics instruction is most effective when:
Time is protected for explicit teaching and practice
Activities are directly aligned with decoding and encoding goals
Tasks are simple, efficient, and purposeful
The research base is clear that explicit, well‑designed instruction in phonics and spelling supports reading development, especially for struggling readers:
Lane, H. B., Pullen, P. C., Hudson, R. F., & Konold, T. R. (2009). Identifying essential instructional components of literacy tutoring for struggling beginning readers. Literacy Research and Instruction, 48(4), 277–297.
National Reading Panel (NRP). (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction.
Pullen, P. C., Lane, H. B., Lloyd, J. W., Nowak, R., & Ryals, J. (2005). Effects of explicit instruction on decoding of struggling first-grade students: A data-based case study. Education and Treatment of Children, 28, 63–76.
Ehri, L. C. (1997). Learning to read and learning to spell are one and the same, almost. In Learning to spell: Research, theory, and practice across languages (pp. 237–268).
Moats, L. C. (2005). How spelling supports reading. American Educator, 6, 12–22, 42.
Stone, L. Activities for Practising Spelling–Toxic to Helpful.
If you’re going to spend time prepping, let it be for activities that directly build decoding, encoding, fluency, and meaning—not just something to keep students “busy.”
Know better, do better!
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