Are you looking for a fresh, new way to work on word building skills with your students? Are they bored with using letter tiles and worksheets to practise this skill? Then look no further!

This interactive PowerPoint includes 15 photographs that are hidden behind letters. The subjects of the photographs may not be what your students expect – and this adds another layer of intrigue to the activity!

Each slide focuses on one particular grapheme as the onset for a word. Students are presented with 8 choices of rime to build words onto the onset, but only 6 of the 8 rimes will build a real word. Every time the student successfully forms a word (by clicking on a rime), a portion of the photograph is revealed.

This sensational activity not only promotes word building skills, but it also encourages enthusiastic discussion about the gradually emerging image.

What Sounds are Explored?

This word building resource explores CVC words only.

The onsets include the following consonants:

• s
• t
• p
• n
• m
• d
• g
• c
• r
• h
• b
• f
• l
• j
• w

This is a great resource to add to your swag of phonemic awareness activities. Help your students practise blending phonemes and strengthen vocabulary as they engage with this word building exercise.

This PowerPoint uses embedded fonts. When the pop-up box appears, select ‘Open Read-Only’ to view the PowerPoint.

Make sure you view the presentation in ‘Slide Show’ mode in order to reveal the picture.

If you’re looking for other word building resources, try one of these:

teaching resource

CVC Word Building Mats

A set of 25 word building mats using consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words.

teaching resource

Onset and Rime Match-Up Activity

A hands-on activity to enable students to practise building words by matching the onset and the rime.