Homophones (4 activities with increasing difficulty)

Teaching homophones for an entire lesson is pretty hard work and the children get so overloaded with words that they can’t remember them all. So I created four smaller 10-20 minute activities to use as lesson starters or fillers to give children the words in smaller doses.

The first is a powerpoint, which would work best as a whole class with whiteboards. It asks if children know any different spellings for a given word and then uses pictures to support the teacher in giving definitions of the words.

The second is a matching activity (matching homophones to their definitions) that pupils could complete in pairs. These words are trickier and may require the children to use dictionaries.

The third activity is a gap fill, asking the children to choose the right homophone to complete the sentence. Again, dictionaries could be useful.

The final activity asks pupils to write their own sentences to show that they understand the different meanings of homophones. There is a points element that could help make this competitive if that’s the way you class works!

All activities meet NEW homophones; they are not repeated from previous activities.