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.}