Word Family Garden

Activity for 4 to 6 year olds.

Do your kids have a serious case of spring fever too?  This word family garden is a great way to focus all of that warm weather daydreaming on an important reading concept: word families!

Put simply, word families are groups of words that share similar spelling patterns.  For example, the words {hot, pot, cot} are all part of the {-OT family}.  The words {cat, sat, pat} are part of the {-AT family}.  Knowing word families helps children with rhyming, spelling, and reading.

Getting Ready

To do this activity, I gathered a few supplies:

• 1 large piece of white paper for the background.  Mine was 22 x 16 inches.
• 4 pieces of different colored paper to make flowers. I used red, blue, yellow and orange.
• 1 piece of green paper to make stems.
• Scissors.
• 1 marker.

I cut out 4 flowers and 4 centers from the colorful construction paper.  Then I glued one center on each of the flowers like this:

Next, I wrote one word family on each of the flower centers.  I used {-op, -ed, -ug, -at} but you could pick anything.

The Word Family Garden

My son and I brainstormed words from each word family. Since he’s still in the prewriting stage, I wrote each word on a different petal.  {If your child has started sounding out words on his own, this is a great time to have him write the words independently.}

We cut out green stems for the flowers and glued them onto the large piece of white paper.  Then we glued the flowers on top.

Viola!  Our word family garden was complete.

Find More

For more word family fun, check out our Word Family Activity Pack filled with eight motivating word family activities.

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Malia Hollowell

Founder at Playdough to Plato

Malia is a National Board Certified teacher who inspires educators with playful approaches to early childhood education. She earned her Master’s from Stanford University and has taught in Pre-Kindergarten through 2nd grade. Malia shares her motivating learning activities on her two popular teaching blogs Playdough to Plato and The STEM Laboratory.

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