A post about the importance of word families and how to teach reading with word families. Daily suggestions, ideas, and activities for teachers provided.
Teaching Word Families
Today I am sharing about one part of my word study program, how to teach reading with word families. I will be sharing how I run my schedule during the week and provide you with a day-to-day plan of action. I have seen a lot of success with this program. My students are thoroughly engaged, actively learning, and building their reading and spelling skills.
Why Teach Word Families?
Learning to read the English language is a difficult task. The English language follows so many different patterns and rules that it is often confusing for our younger students learning to read.
Word families, also called phonograms or “chunks,” provide us with groups of words that have a predictable pattern or “chunk.” These words have the same ending, and they all rhyme. This makes learning a set of words (a word family) easier on our beginning readers.
Word Families Throughout the Week
After learning our word families for the week, my students can read and spell a group of words independently. They feel incredibly successful at their accomplishment. They now have a larger bank of words they can read in the books they are encountering.
Teaching my students word families is an incredibly efficient way for me to teach my students how to read. Since we learn word families each week, I wanted to create a set of activities that students find fun and engaging, yet help them to become fluent in reading the words within a word family.
Monday Activities for Teaching Word Families
Tuesday Activities for Teaching Word Families
Wednesday Activities for Teaching Word Families
Thursday Activities for Teaching Word Families
During our morning meeting, we take out our small whiteboards and markers and practice recording our words. Sometimes they sit with a partner and quiz each other, and sometimes I will give them words to record. This exercise is a quick assessment for me to check how they are doing. This activity could also be a part of your small group time. We work more on word meaning. We have a few activities that we rotate through each week to keep things interesting. For instance, we complete our fill-in sheets for morning work, where we have to pick the correct word to fit in an empty space. We also create read, draw, and color books where we have to read a sentence, dray its meaning, and color the picture.
Friday Activities for Teaching Word Families
Word Families Homework
Resources for Teaching Word Families
See the word families resource in action!
Classroom Materials for Teaching Word Families
FREE -AT Word Family Activities
To get started, check out the free downloadable resource: short ‘a’ vowel word family pack of activities. Click the image below to get your copy!
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