Word Families and Phonics - FREE activities

I am so excited to begin working on word families with my students.

We have worked hard to learn letter sounds, isolate first, middle and final sounds in CVC words, blend CVC words and now we are ready for word families.

This is where the magic happens!

We have filled their toolboxes using the previous units, and now we will truly launch into reading fluently.

If you’re just getting started, you can visit my phonics homepage HERE.

STEP 1: TEACH SPECIFIC WORD PATTERNS

Step 1 is teaching students specific word patterns/families. In the beginning, they may have to say each individual sound, and then blend them together. The goal is for them to look at a word chunk and automatically know the sound (fluency with word families.)

On your white board, write a word family. I put dots below each letter for children who need to look at each sound first to blend.

I warm up by doing this with several word families using the same vowel: -at, -ag, -am, -an, etc. I suggest starting with two letter word chunks at a time, before moving on to three letter word chunks such as -ast, -ank, etc.

Then, I choose one word family, and we dive deeper!

STEP 2: PRACTICE SPECIFIC WORD PATTERNS

I am sharing all of the resources I show here to teach the -at word family for FREE at the bottom of this blog post, so you can try these activities with your students!

Chose a word family to teach. I am showing the word family -at, but you can start with any you choose. These do not necessarily have to be taught a in a specific order.

I would suggest going through and doing all of the two letter word families before moving on to the three letter word chunks.

Once we segment and blend the sounds, I ask students, “Can we put a letter before -at to make a new word?”

You can do this orally first, and let students play with the word. This is why having a strong foundation in phonemic awareness and rhyming is so important.

Then, we generate words together on the white board. I like to use different color markers so students can see the word family.

Now, I give students this activity page to practice finding the word family within each word.

The goal is for children to quickly recognize word chunks within words.

This way, instead of sounding out the entire word, they can break the word into patterns they recognize.

STEP 3: BUILDING FLUENCY WITH A NEW WORD FAMILY

Now that we have learned a new word family and practiced it, we need to become fluent. Fluency is the number one indicator of comprehension (which is the ultimate goal of reading.)

If students are taking too long to decode words, they do not end up understanding what they read.

I use three resources to practice fluency with our new words:

Students love the routine of these activities, and I appreciate not having to give directions each time. The setup is the exact same for each word family, so students look forward to knowing what to expect.

Once you teach a few lessons, they have the routine down!

I start with the word family ladders, then move to the fluency worksheet, and finally we do the fluency pyramids.

These three resources work so well together.

STEP 4: WRITING WORD FAMILIES

If you’ve used my resources before, then you know I am a huge advocate of incorporating reading and writing.

These two skills go hand in hand.

So I created these adorable mini books so students can read and write new word families!

The word bank on each page gives students a list of ideas of what word would make sense to complete the sentence.

This is also working on beginning comprehension skills. At the end of the book, students write all of the words from the word family along with a sentence. If they are struggling to come up with a sentence, I let them copy a sentence from one of the pages.

STEP 5: CONTEXT AND COMPREHENSION

The growth you’ll see with your students is incredible. It is so much fun to be a part of!

We are ready for word family stories… complete with comprehension and extension activities. The stories come in both color and black and white. I copy the activity page to the back, so each student only needs one piece of paper.