Using word families, you will learn how to teach beginning reading using these free phonics resources and strategies. Find out what I did wrong and how I learned to teach beginning reading using word patterns. Then you’ll access your free Word Family lessons and activities below.
Once upon a time, there was a teacher girl…
But this teacher was totally stuck! She had tried just about everything to teach her first-grade students how to read unknown words. And above all, she had a lesson observation scheduled with her principal… LIKE NEXT WEEK!!!
Secretly, she started doing a crazy amount of research. This wasn’t easy either. Believe it or not, this was before the birth of GOOGLE.
This teacher decided that no matter what, she HAD TO LEARN how to teach her newbie readers how to solve unknown words they encountered while reading.
Knowing about reading is not enough.
Knew about phonics? CHECK
Had a specialization in reading? CHECK
Worked for a super poor district that couldn’t afford new materials? CHECK
Firstly, the odds were against her because not only were these students less than privileged, but English was their second language. Her students needed a strategy that was simple and to the point.
Fast forward to about 4 days later… that awesome but crazy teacher girl stayed up for days and nights doing her research.
She pulled out her college textbooks on literacy, ESL resources and even made a trip to the public library. Google wasn’t even a thing yet.
Yes, I said it… LIBRARY! Not GOOGLE, Library.
What happened? What did I learn about word patterns?
By combining the best strategy components and getting rid of the ones we really didn’t need…
She discovered a SUPER SIMPLE STRATEGY for teaching students how to read unknown words by teaching word families.
Yes, teachers, there is a certain way that you teach word families. Above all, it is soooo much easier and simpler than you thought.
I am super excited to share my FREE mini ebook. When I say “mini,” I mean mini. You will read the word families pdf super fast and just take off.
You will be teaching students how to actively use word family knowledge to read unknown words. Therefore, this is a strategy that every student needs to have in their reading toolbox. Below is a simple outline for how to teach word families.
- Start with one-syllable words (this is super important)
- Create a word family anchor chart
- Make new words with the pattern
- Engage your students with hands-on learning fun
Of course, this is just the bare bones. In other words, you will get the meat when you read the free resource.
What resources do I need to start teaching word families?
- plastic letters
- anchor chart paper
- Mr. Sketch markers
- Tabletop magnetic dry erase board (you can see my magnetic whiteboard in the photo above)
The educational resources above will help you prepare for the word family activities.
Word family books?
Later, in the instructions for getting started with teaching word families, you will read about using picture books to complement your word family mini-lessons. I have been messaged by several teachers that want to know which are good books to use when teaching word families.
Teaching word families books:
The Cat in the Hat
Green Eggs and Ham
Hop on Pop
Fox in Socks
I see a nice little trend here. Dr. Seuss is where it’s at!! You might as well shoot for the entire Dr. Seuss book collection! There are so many more books, but that will have to be another blog post.
Next, you’ll have to do a tad bit of research. You will want the book to match whatever word pattern – word family you are teaching.
In conclusion, when you download the FREE mini-ebook, there is also a link to an additional FREE word family product.
Teaching Word Families: 4 SUPER SIMPLE STEPS
Please leave a message below to tell me what you think.
Best wishes!
Some links are affiliate links. At no cost to you, I make a small commission on those purchases.
Cat, bat, sat, and rat. They don’t just rhyme–they are members of the same word family! If you want to know how to teach word families, we’ve got the answers right here.
What Are Word Families?
Word families are groups of words related by spelling pattern and pronunciation. They have a similar component, meaning that once you learn to read one word, you can easily read the other words in the same family. For example, the words cat, rat, and bat are all in the -at word family.
Some words appear to be in the same family because they are spelled the same, but their pronunciations are different. Blood and mood both end with -ood, but they are not in the same word family because they do not rhyme.
In 1970, Professors Richard E. Wylie and Donald D. Durrel published an educational journal article entitled “Teaching Vowels Through Phonograms.” The article listed the 37 most common word families (or phonograms) in the English language. Teachers still use their list to introduce students to phonetic patterns.
When you teach word families, you point out the patterns in words, making both reading and spelling easier to learn. Your beginning reader will be able to decode with increased confidence as he recognizes words with the same phonogram (like sight and bright). It’s also a great way to focus on the different meanings of similar-sounding words.
10 Common Word Families
If you want to know how to teach word families, you have to be able to recognize them. Here is a list of 10 common word families.
-ight
bright, light, sight, might, tight, night, blight, fright, fight
-at
mat, sat, bat, cat, that, gnat, rat, brat, fat, hat, pat
-ite
bite, kite, white, mite, rite, site
-ool
cool, pool, drool, fool, tool
-un
bun, sun, gun, run, fun, nun, pun
-out
shout, grout, about, rout, clout, bout, gout, pout, tout
-one
zone, bone, tone, alone, lone, cone, phone
-eat
beat, seat, cleat, neat, feat, heat, peat, wheat, cheat
-ow as in “low”
tow, mow, snow, throw, grow, blow, sow, bow, low, arrow, yellow
-ay
say, may, pay, cay, bray, allay, lay, pay, way, ray, day
Word Family Activities
You can practice word families with these multisensory activities.
Word Family Eggs
Reuse last year’s plastic Easter eggs in this reading craft. When your student twists the egg, he reveals a new word in the word family.
Crazy Eggs Word Family Game
This interactive game combines reading with matching. You can make this game in 5 minutes! Kids get to take charge and create colorful combinations (and practice reading at the same time).
Nursery Rhymes
Nursery rhymes are chock-full of word families. Play a seek-and-find game where you list the word family, and then the student hunts for the members of the family in the nursery rhyme while you read it aloud. Some of the best nursery rhymes for this game are Old Mother Hubbard, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Little Mouse, and Knick Knack Paddy Whack.
Magnet Board
If you have a set of alphabet magnets and a magnet board (or a fridge), you can create a word family by placing the phonogram on the board (like -at) and then adding different beginning letters for the student to read.
Word Family Cars
Draw a colorful car on the front of 10 envelopes. Label each vehicle with a word family phonogram. Inside, the different “members of the family” are taking a ride. These are cut-up index cards with initial letters on them. For example, the -en car envelope has the letters p, wh, t, and d inside. The student can slide out the index cards and place them by the car to read a word in the word family.
How to Teach Word Families to New Readers
Teaching word families is not complicated; it’s simple! By trying some of these word family activities, you will empower your beginning reader to tackle unfamiliar words and decode them with confidence.
You May Also Like:
- How to Create the Ultimate Kids Reading Nook
- How to Teach High Frequency Words
- How to Teach Rhyming Words
Teaching word families is a great way to improve the reading abilities of primary-grade students. A word family is any grouping of words that have the same vowel sound and contain the same short sequence of letters, often at the end. Start by teaching your students a few simple word families. Once students have familiarized themselves with an easy word family and can recognize other words in that family, move on to teaching more word families, including word families with multisyllabic words and more complex vowel sounds.
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Write 5-6 words in a word family on your whiteboard. Start with a simple word family that contains 3-letter words and simple vowel sounds. So, you could begin by introducing students to the “-at” word family.[1]
Students should already know these words’ meanings and pronunciations.- For example, write on the whiteboard: “cat,” “hat,” “mat,” “rat,” and “sat,”
- If there are English-language learner (ELL) students in the classroom, put a picture of each word up on the whiteboard next to the word itself.
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Ask your students to spot the similarities between the words in the family. This will motivate your students to engage themselves with the lesson material. While some students may initially try to find similarities in the words’ meaning, they’ll eventually conclude that the words all have the same ending and the same short vowel sound.[2]
- If students are struggling to grasp the common element, explain that the words all end in “-at” and have the same ending sound.
- It may help visual learners if you underline or circle the “-at” of each word with a different color marker.
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Ask students to add new words to the family by moving through the alphabet. After reading the initial 5-6 words out loud to the class, ask students to move through the alphabet from A to Z and try out each letter before the “-at” ending. This will allow the class to complete the list of 3-letter words in the family.[3]
Students may think of other words like “pat” and “fat.”- It may help students if you hand out cards with the alphabet on them.
- Students will inevitably come up with words like “aat,” “wat,” or “zat.” Remind students that words in the word family need to make sense and have a meaning.
- Students may initially be confused as to why some words with similar endings do not belong in a word family, for example, “son” and “con.” If the students are too young to understand the concept of long and short vowel sounds, tell them something like, “They’re in different word families because the letters in the middle of the word don’t make the same sound.”
- If there are ELL students in the class, have pictures of the other words in the word family ready to put up on the board.
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Introduce students to other simple word families. Students will easily understand the idea of the “family” as a grouping based on similarities. Encourage them to think of other simple 3-letter words that rhyme with one another. Say something like, “I’ve introduced you to the ‘-at’ word family. Now let me introduce you to a few more.”[4]
Then write on the whiteboard:- The “-an” family: ran, fan, tan, man.
- The “-ad” family: mad, sad, bad, had, pad, lad.
- The “-am” family: ham, ram, Sam, bam, jam, yam.
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Encourage students to expand word families based on rhyming sounds. Students will retain the concept of word families better if you allow them to help you list the words in the family. Remind students that all of the words in a word family will rhyme with one another. Then, ask students to raise their hands or call out other words that belong in the word families you’ve written on the board.[5]
- It’s OK to give students hints or prompts to help them come up with words in a word family.
- For example, if you’re working on the “-an” family and students haven’t yet said “fan,” say something like, “I’m thinking of a word that starts with the letter ‘f.’ ”
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Ask students to use word-family words in a sentence. As students begin to understand what word families are, and add more words to the family, make sure that they understand the meaning of the words and aren’t just combining random letter sounds. If a student calls out an addition to a word family—for example, “pat”—ask the student to use the word in a simple sentence.[6]
- Slow readers may struggle to use simple vocabulary words in a sentence. In this case, ask instead, “Could you tell me what the word ‘pat’ means?”
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Add 2- and 3-syllable words to your word families. Once you’ve been working with word families for a while and your students fully understand the concept, you can begin to add more complex words to the families. Clarify to your students that these multisyllabic words still have the same root vowel sound as the rest of the family, e.g., “-at,” “-an,” or “-am,” even if the vowel sound no longer comes at the end of the word.[7]
- For example, in the “-an” family, add words like: “planet,” “panda,” “banjo,” “fancy,” and “chance.” Let students know that although these words have the “-an” in the middle of the word rather than at the end, they still belong to the “-an” family.
- Explain the meanings of these words to any students who aren’t already familiar.
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Ask students to spell words in the word family. Test your students’ retention by asking them to spell words from the word family without a visual aid.[8]
Provide each student with a sheet of paper. Explain that they need to spell the words from a specific word family. Then, enunciate words like “can,” “man,” “bed,” “fed,” “ram,” “ham,” etc.- Try this part of the lesson on a separate day from the word-family introduction. So, if you introduced word families on Tuesday, ask students to spell words on Wednesday or Thursday.
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Distribute worksheets that encourage students to form words in certain word families. Write 4 or 5 common word family suffixes (e.g., “-in,” “-an,” “-at,” and “-am”) on the left side of the page. At the bottom of the page, arrange a “letter bank” that has various letters needed to complete the words in the word families. Ask students to write letters from the word bank in front of the word-family suffixes and complete various word-family words.
- Then, in the “letter bank,” include letters like “p,” “m,” “h,” and “b” that can be used to make a compete word in 1 or more of the word families.
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Ask student groups to write a story using at least 6 words from a word family. This will work best if students are placed into groups of 4-5. Once students are in groups, assign a word family to each group. Ask each group to write a 1-2 page story using at least half a dozen words from a single word family.[9]
- For example, a group of students could use the words: «fan,» «can,» «pan,» «man,» and «tan.»
- If students are doing well with the assignment, ask them to illustrate the story as well.
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Give each student a laminated note card with a word from a word family. Then place full-sized sheets of paper in each corner of the classroom, each with the suffix of a word family on it. Ask the students to move to the corner with the word family that their particular word fits into. After students have completed the exercise once, re-distribute the cards and ask students to complete the exercise again.
- For example, place sheets of paper reading “-an,” “-am,” “-at,” and “-it” in the 4 corners of your classroom. Distribute laminated cards that display words that fit into these word families.
- So, the child holding a card that reads “sit” will move into the corner with the “-it” word family.
Word Family Worksheet and Examples
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In more technical vocabulary, word families are called “phonograms.”[10]
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The point at which you introduce complex words to word families depends on how quickly your students grasp the concept of word families, and on how quickly they learn how to spell the words and use them in sentences. If you introduce simple word families in the beginning of First grade, add complex words near the end of the school year.
References
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In my opinion, word walls are a must in a primary classroom BUT only if you teach kids how to use it. Word families are an important part of the word wall as well. Teaching kids to read and spell words by learning patterns helps with retention and improves reading. How do you get this information to stick? Read on to see how I teach word families in a way that kids remember them and refer to them in the classroom.
In previous posts, I have shared about how I get started with a word wall at the start of the school year and how I teach difficult to read and spell rule breaker words. In my last post, I shared some daily routines to do with your word wall to make the words stick and get your students invested in using the word wall.
You can find Part 1 here: Getting Started with a Word Wall.
You can find Part 2 here: Teaching Rule Breaker Words Using a Word Wall
You can find Part 3 here: Simple Ways to Practice Word Wall Words Daily
Monday is always the day I introduce all of the new words for the week (usually 5). Tuesday is usually the day of the week we work with our new word family for the week. We use that time to build a pocket chart with our word family together and then create an anchor poster that will stay up in the classroom.
When we are building the words in the pocket chart I add a kinesthetic component. Students hold their hands up, facing out and make a fist. When we say the initial sound or sounds they push the right hand out and then the left hand for the word family. When we blend together the onset and rime we push our fists together. I find getting them moving while we do this increases engagement.
After we complete the pocket chart we create a poster that stays up as a reminder of our word building for that word family. Students come up and write a word in the word family on the poster and the posters are displayed close to the word wall and are used as a reference for students.
I start the year with short vowel word families and then move to long vowel word families. I do not teach every.single.one. Instead, I choose word families that are most common and we spend our time on those.
So for instance, when I have finished focusing on all the Short A word families we have a wrap-up activity to highlight the spelling patterns we did not cover. We do a partner write activity. I place all the remaining blank word family posters around the room and we do a SCOOT activity to add words to them with students working in pairs to add one new word family word to each poster.
You should notice that at every single stage of my word family instruction the students are involved in the process. Most everything that is placed on the walls in my classroom is created with students or by students. The only way to get kids invested in using the resources in the classroom is to involve them in creating them or explicitly teaching them how to use them.
Are you looking for a digital version of this to use with your students? It is now available in a Google Slides version
Short Vowel Word Family Google Slides
If you are interested in the posters you can find two different versions here:
My word family instruction continues during my Daily 5 instruction during word work. While I am focusing on Short A in my word family instruction I am also providing centers to practice spelling, reading, recognizing and building Short A words. These centers are very popular with my kids.
Don’t forget to pin it!
Until next time,
Watching your students grow into successful readers is one of the most exciting things about teaching kindergarten and first grade. Seeing my students go from pre-emergent readers to fluent readers amazes me every time! After months and months of hard work, something clicks and their reading takes off. But we know that behind the scenes, there was a lot of intentional planning to get them there. One of the most successful strategies I have found to help young students learn to read is teaching with word families.
How to Teach Word Families
Teaching reading with word families is one of the most effective techniques I have found as an early literacy educator. The repetition that students see and hear within the words is very important. They start to recognize the phonics patterns quickly and use these skills to help them decode words for years to come. Practicing word families also builds on the skill of rhyming and helps to make the connection between sounds being heard and the letters that make them.
Students begin to understand the basic sounds of letters and words by using word family activities. The process of focusing on a word family allows students to master the “chunk” in the word. Through practice and repetition of the same word family, students become more fluent readers! Check out this FREE resource for using word families to develop reading fluency.
Once students recognize how the rime (the ending chunk of the word) stays the same, they only have to focus on changing the beginning sound. Reading with word families makes decoding much faster and easier for students, which builds their reading confidence. There are so many fun and engaging ways to incorporate word families into your reading lessons. Let’s take a look at some of my favorites!
#1 – Introduce Word Families with Pictures
One of the easiest ways to introduce word families is with pictures. This is a great place to start when introducing a new set of words. Pictures help students make the connection between the sounds of words and the meaning of the sounds. And if your emergent readers have not quite mastered their phonemic awareness, it is a great strategy to help them recognize that letters create words. This not only helps with decoding but it also reinforces that letters have sounds.
Before children are even able to talk, they are already making that important connection between an object they see and the word that is used to describe it. Using that natural way of learning helps students to learn new words and understand that when the letter sounds are put together, they form the word that represents the image.
#2 – Use Hands-On Centers
We all know how much students can learn from hands-on activities. One of the best ways to bring highly-engaging word family practice to your classroom is through centers! By using hands-on centers as part of the learning process, your students will be more engaged and often won’t even realize they are learning!
Word family practice can be incorporated into literacy centers in many different ways. For example, write and reveal activities allow students to build words in various word families. If you’d like to focus on one particular short vowel word family, you can just add those write and reveal activities to the center. The best part of this activity is that each card is self-checking using clothespins (this also adds a bit of hand-strengthening to the center).
CVC word-building activities are a class favorite year after year! I love that they are easy to store and grab as needed. It’s probably no surprise that these activities find their way to our reading groups for word family practice many times during the year!
Another reason to use centers for practicing word families is that they can be individualized based on the needs of your students. For young learners who are ready for more of a challenge, you can add multiple word families that use several different vowels.
#3 – Practice Identifying Word Families Quickly
Word identification is an important part of reading. The faster that students can learn to recognize the “chunks” of word families, the better their reading will be. In my word family mini-books, I incorporated some fun word search activities to help students with this skill.
The first activity is a word quilt. Each square contains a different word with a mix of word family words and other CVC words. Students must find and color all the words from the target word family. They can practice reading the words again once they have found and colored each one.
Students can also put on their detective caps and go searching for word family words in sentences. Before reading the sentences, students search for and circle the word family words. Not only does this give them practice in finding that important chunk, but it also helps them prepare for reading the sentence.
#4 – Read Word Families in Context
Once students have been introduced to the new word family and read some words, it is important to move those words into a sentence. After all, this is how students will find the words in real life. Reading words in a sentence is one of the final steps of teaching reading with word families.
These simple sentences use basic sight words and word family words to provide a fun way to practice reading sentences. The students love seeing how their reading fluency improves as they read and re-read.
Begin by having your students go through the sentences and circle or highlight any words in the designated word family. Next, have them read each sentence three times. They can do this with a partner, in a center, or even for homework.
Sentence strips are a great way to keep your word family sentences organized. You can laminate the strips and keep each set of word families together on a binder ring. This allows for easy access in small groups or reading centers.
As students find success reading sentences, you can move them on to simple word family reading passages. Students really love knowing that they can read a story all on their own.
The best part of these reading fluency passages is that students can also use this resource to work on reading comprehension. One low prep activity that helps students practice reading with accuracy, fluency, and comprehension? Yes, please!
I hope that these activity ideas have shown you that teaching reading with word families can be a lot of fun! Using pictures, games, identification, and context will help your students become budding readers in no time!
CVC Activities for Teaching Word Families
Are you looking for low prep activities to practice word families? Check out this HUGE bundle of phonics activities for CVC words. It’s full of engaging ways to help your students master word families. All of the activities shown above can be found in this money-saving bundle, plus so much more! Click below to check out everything that is included in this bundle.
Save These Word Family Activities
Be sure to save these word family tips and resources to your favorite classroom Pinterest board. Then you can quickly come back whenever you need ideas for teaching reading in your classroom.
