Phonics with Obb and Bob

Introducing… Obb and Bob!

So, to start, have you heard of Obb and Bob? You may well just have, but they are our two bin friends which help students with their learning of phonics.

If you haven’t heard of them though, then keep reading! It’s all to do with an activity teachers are using where they decorate two bins with Obb and Bob on (these could be monsters or cute bins), and then have a series of words on cards or building blocks with sounds on to make words. The idea is they ask their students to put words in either the bin that has nonsense words, Obb, or real words, Bob.

It’s a great, super fun way to practise phonics, and adds a bit of a creative spin for engagement too, to get the whole class involved.

Do you like it? We hope you do!

Phonics Resources on EducationCity

To further support your preparation for the Phonics Screening Check, we’ve listed out some really great activities you can do below with your students in class on EducationCity – take a look!

Phonics Screening Check Topic Tool (#14758)

Perfect for helping students get to grips with the basics of phonics, the Phonics Screening Check Topic Tool is a super practical check for improving understanding of real and alien words.

Why Should I Use the Phonics Screening Check Topic Tool?

  • Personalise the Test to Your Needs: you can create a test and choose all the words you want to include in it (CVC, CVCC, etc.).
  • Ideal Test Preparation: as the tool follows the same format as the Phonics Screening Check, including the use of alien words for identifying pseudo words, it’s ideal for preparation, and words can be printed out in flashcard format for practice.
  • Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses to Help Your Teaching: the test also pulls a list of words read both correctly and incorrectly for you to view, which means you can easily see how students are doing.Phonics Screening Check Topic Tool

 

Phonics Dictionary Topic Tool (#19735)

The Phonics Dictionary makes ideal phonics practice as it’s great for investigating phonemes and graphemes, and reinforcing phonic knowledge to decode words.

  • Choose a Sound from the Phoneme Bank: with so many sounds to choose from, you can focus on the sounds your students may have difficulty with.
  • Hear the Sounds: great for recall, you can also hear the words being sounded out with emphasis on phonemes.

 

We’ve also picked out a few phonics Activities for you to try too…

EYFS

Farm Friends: #26077 – Listen to the word and order the sounds in CVC words. Thisites activity can be used as a precursor to reading, allowing children to recognise how words can be broken down into sounds.

Paint Pots: #12249 – Sounding out CVC words.

Pack a Rucksack: #983 – Learn the /k/ sound spelled ‘ck’.

Sparkler: #25558 – Listen to phase 2 high frequency words and tricky words and match these to the written word.

KS1

Mitch and Patch: #20643 – Recognise the sound/grapheme and spelling rule for ‘tch’ words.

Wet Weather Fun: #20638 – Learn the vowel digraph ‘ea’ with the short vowel sound, e.g., head, weather.

Sten and Klara’s Sports Day: #19728 – Reading and spelling tricky words: oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, looked, called, asked, could.

Toy Museum: #14913 – Reading tricky words (said, have, like, so, do, some, come, were, there, little, one, when, out, what).

We hope we’ve given you some inspiration for phonics teaching! If you use the Obb and Bob bins, we’d love to see them – tweet us a photo of them to @EducationCity.