Phoneme Home

Phoneme Home is a digital puzzle game about (English) phonemes, the individual sounds that make up words. It’s a crucial first step towards learning more complicated words and alphabet letters later.

Every time you play,

• The game secretly picks a common word children will recognize, like BED or PIG.
• The game gives you the individual phonemes for this word, scattered across the screen.
  • Click on them to hear the sound they make.
  • They also show an image of a common word that starts with this phoneme (or contains it a lot) as an extra help.
• It’s your job to put them in the right order to recreate the original word!
  • After clicking a sound, simply click the space where it should go.
  • Once all spaces are filled, it plays the word you made so you can hear if you were right.

The game has 5 difficulty levels. The easiest difficulty setting only picks the shortest/simplest words. Each word also has an image and sound effect to confirm you were right when you solve it. The harder difficulties contain much longer words and start using letters instead of images, to help make the transition to using the alphabet.

There are over 700 words in the game! You can play over and over without running into the same word, on all difficulties. And even if you do run into the same word, the random scattering of phonemes likely makes it a puzzle still.

You can customize the experience through the numerous settings.

• The game has a dark mode and a light mode.
• You can turn on hints: it will show the image of what you’re looking for and the player “merely” has to put phonemes in the right order to make that.
• You can turn on swiping (instead of clicking): swipe from a phoneme to a slot to place it inside.
• You can turn off several animations / visual elements if they’re too distracting.
• And more!

We’ve made many teaching resources and quizzes for pre-readers before. We still desperately wanted to make puzzles and games too, as they are even more effective teaching tools. Especially when it comes to language and using sound. It’s hard to make such a puzzle, though, when the player can’t read or count yet. After lots of brainstorming, and trial and error, we landed upon this unique idea. And now we’re proud to present what we believe is the only true phoneme puzzle game made so far!

Of course, there are many different regional accents that pronounce English words in different ways. In this game we stuck to the standard, formal pronounciation. Whenever in doubt, we favor the British voicing; the narrator (upon completing a puzzle correctly) has a British accent too.

The title Phoneme Home is a pun on the phrase Phoning Home, matching the themes of space and sounds in the entire game.

We hope this puzzle game helps your Apprentices learn all about different phonemes, learn some new words, and most of all have fun solving these little challenges!