Word families are a fun and important way to help children learn to read and write! To be successful readers, children need to know how to rhyme as well as how to read and write those rhymes. Fortunately, here at 4 Kinder Teachers, we have created some fun and engaging word family worksheets and activities to make it easy for you.
As a kindergarten teacher and a mom, I am the proud owner of multiple copies of Cat in the Hat, Hop on Pop, Go Dog Go, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Green Eggs and Ham, and… well, you get the picture. Thanks to Dr. Seuss (and diligent parents and teachers like you), our children can hear and often produce rhyming words, but reading and writing them can be a more difficult task. (To learn more about rhyming activities for kindergarten and other phonemic awareness activities, check out our Phonemic Awareness Activities.)
What is a Word Family?
A word family is a group of words that contain the same letter combination, such as cat, hat, bat, rat, mat, pat, chat. You may have noticed that they also rhyme; Dr. Seuss loved word families! Word families help children learn to read and write commonly used spelling patterns. They can help children learn to segment and blend onset and rime such as /c/ /at/, /cat/. When I taught my kindergarten students how to read, one very important reading strategy was chunking. Chunking is when students use a part of a word they already know to figure out the rest of the word (ie quacking – if students know the ack chunk and the ing chunk, they can blend the chunks together (/qu/ /ack/ /ing/) and read the word quacking.) There are many different word families, but here are a few examples I used when teaching word families in kindergarten.
- at word family: cat, bat, mat, sat, rat, pat, fat, hat, chat
- an word family: pan, ran, man, fan, van, can, plan, ban
- ack word family: black, rack, quack, pack, sack, stack, back, crack
- ing word family: wing, sing, ring, thing, king, sting, swing, bring
- et word family: jet, wet, set, pet, bet, get, vet, met, net
- og word family: dog, hog, log, frog, bog, smog, cog, fog
- ug word family: hug, mug, rug, jug, bug, tug, dug, slug, plug
- am word family: ram, ham, clam, jam, Sam, yam, dam, slam
- ake word family: rake, make, fake, take, bake, cake, wake, snake, lake
Word Family Worksheets for Kindergarten
We have made some cute, fun, and rigorous worksheets on word families for you! The worksheets are differentiated to meet the needs of all your students. Whether your students are tracing letters, just writing a few letters, or writing all on their own, we have something for each of them! Each word family packet has two sets of word cards with matching pictures (one set in black and white; one in color) to help introduce each word family. We have also included fun activities to play with your students as well as easy instructions on the top of each worksheet. Each packet has 14 pages that work great in the classroom or as extra practice at home for homework. We have created 8 different word family packets: at Word Family Worksheets, an Word Family Worksheets, am Word Family Worksheets, ack Word Family Worksheets, et Word Family Worksheets, og Word Family Worksheets, ug Word Family Worksheets, and ing Word Family Worksheets. You can purchase these separately or bundled together for an awesome discount. We hope you enjoy our worksheets!
More Alphabet Worksheets
Looking for more reading skills worksheets? We have plenty!! Check out our Alphabet Animals Reading Skills Curriculum. You can get the whole curriculum or just the worksheets you need for your class now. We hope you enjoy using our products. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. We will get back to you as soon as possible!
2 Responses
I love these worksheets!
So glad you love them, we do too!!!