A little adventure
with the English letters

Yalla Phonics is a free website for Arabic-speaking parents and teachers who want to teach a child aged 3 to 7 the English alphabet the way English schools do: through phonics, which links each letter to the sound it makes rather than to its name. The child who knows that c says "k", a says "a" and t says "t" can read cat on their own, and that moment is where reading begins.

Everything here is explained in Arabic, for an Arabic ear. Each of the 26 letter pages gives the letter's name and sound with audio, the closest Arabic sound, the mistakes Arabic speakers typically make (P heard as B, V heard as F, the short vowels), an example word, a jungle animal to remember it by, and a step-by-step guide to writing it. The phonics guide answers the questions parents ask most: names or sounds first, what age to start, and how long a session should be.

After the letters come 49 phonics sounds such as sh, ch, th and the magic e, 50 word families for blending practice, 133 sight words by level, and 137 everyday words by topic, from numbers and colours to clothes and the weather, each with its pronunciation, a sentence and the Arabic meaning. Our kids' dictionary sounds out every word letter by letter.

For practice away from the screen there are 210 printable PDF worksheets: single-line tracing, colouring, picture-and-word matching and letter hunts, with a name and date field on every sheet. The KG1, KG2 and Grade 1 pages turn all of this into a week-by-week plan, and the pronunciation mistakes page shows how to fix the twelve errors we hear most often.

Ten minutes a day is enough. Pick a letter, listen, repeat, trace, then find the sound at the start of a word. Yalla Phonics is made in the UAE by KDK420 General Trading LLC and is free for home and classroom use. Questions and corrections are welcome on the contact page.