Do your kids have a serious case of spring fever, too?  This word family activity is a great way to focus all of that warm weather daydreaming on an important reading concept: word families!  Watch them turn into a beautiful garden right before your eyes.

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.

If you’re feeling like your child or student is ready to read, check out our amazing Emergent Readers Bundle in our shop!

Getting Ready

To do this word family 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

Ready for the next step?! Check out our Emergent Readers Bundle in our shop for your beginning reader!