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Word families are such a fun thing to teach first graders.  It’s a first step in building confidence in reading.  I have been incorporating word families into my mini-lessons over the last few days.  This week, we also began a lot of hands-on activities to help reinforce them.

Word Families

We have been busy learning about short A word families and my kids were really engaged with various activities this week.  I created a mixture of practice items because I have a wide range of kiddos.  Some things were very easy, but my kids still enjoyed them.  Here are some of the activities we did:

Sound Posters

I hang sound posters up for my students to refer to often.  I also put mini-ones in their word work tubs.  I often find them reading them.

Sorts

I love using paint sticks in the classroom for sorts.  I place two different word families in word work tubs and have students practice sorting out the sounds.  We also practice this in small groups.  You can read more about how I use paint sticks here.

 

Fluency Practice

I try to provide various ways to practice fluency with word families.  Some of my students are still sounding out each word, others zoom through them.  I always put out word fluency and phrase fluency practice activities to meet the needs of all of my students.

Word Building

For my beginning readers, I provide plenty of opportunities for word building.  It’s fun to see their confidence build as they work with these activities.  They begin to see the “aha”.

Practice!

In addition to all of the above activities, I like to provide a lot of ways to apply their learning.  These are a few of activities I like to put in their word work tubs.

The one thing that drives my crazy is when I can’t tell what word a picture if suppose to represent, so I have made these word family rings to help me and my parent helpers when that situation arises.

I love teaching about words families in the beginning of the year.  It’s such a great way to build confidence in my little readers because they are successful with these simple patterns.  If you are interested in any of these activities, they can be found by individual word families:

• AD
• AG
• AM
• AN
• AP
• AT
• EN
• ET
• IG
• IN
• ING
• INK
• IP
• OG
• OP
• UG

or get them all in a bundle.