With St. Patrick’s Day quickly approaching, this fun leprechaun-inspired word family sort is a must-try.

Kids will love playing with gold (who can blame them?!) and YOU’LL love that they’re practicing important reading skills.

To make it easier for you to get EVERY student bigger results, the freebie comes in TWO versions so you can quickly adjust the difficulty:

  1. One focuses on rhyming
  2. And the second option stretches students to spell CVC words.

Grab your copy below and then hop over and snag our 26 more word work centers your students will beg to repeat in our shop!

What Are 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…

Word families are great because they help students work on important reading skills including rhyming, recognizing spelling patterns and reading more fluently.

Getting Ready

Thankfully, the prep was quick and easy.

I printed off the pots of gold, the coins and the record sheet.

I slide the pieces through my laminator to make them durable enough that I could use them again and then cut along the lines to separate the pieces.

Viola! My prep was done.

Word Family Sort

With everything in hand, I invited my son over to join me.

(I was tempted to use my awesome leprechaun impersonation but decided to save it for St. Patrick’s Day. ?)

I explained that we were going to work on word families and, just like all of the people in our family have the same last name, all of the words in a word family end in the same sound.

I showed my son the leprechaun pots and we read the word families out loud together: -ET, -OP, -UG.

Then, I gave him the first piece of leprechaun gold and asked him to name the picture he saw.

“Pet!” he announced confidently.

Thinking carefully about the last sound he heard in that word, I challenged him to figure out what pot was a match.

After stretching out the word several times and focusing on the last sound, he slid the gold underneath the -ET pot.

One piece after the next, my son continued reading and sorting the coins from the pile until they all landed in the right spot.

Once all the gold coins had been placed by the correct pot, it was time to do a little review and writing practice!

After carefully reading each word out loud, my son wrote each word into the correct word family on the record sheet.

The activity was such a fun and easy way to add a little magic to March!

Grab Your Download

Click the blue “download” below to grab the freebie and then hop over to snag our mega pack of word work activities in our shop!

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5 Comments

  1. whoah this blog is excellent i really like reading your articles. Stay up the good work! You already know, many persons are looking around for this info, you could help them greatly. dcbfdddddkdd

  2. Hey Malia-
    If you’re anything like me, you want nothing but excellence on your website. Would you be so kind as to change the recording sheet for Pot of Gold Word Families to represent the -un family as well? I know I could just white it out, but I’m a picky girl. You can certainly remove my comment once you’ve read it.

    Thanks!

    1. Hi Debra,
      Thanks for catching that.
      We will get it corrected.
      Warmly,
      Ashley // Happiness Ambassador

    2. It’s been fixed Debra!
      You can download the updated version now 🙂
      Warmly,
      Ashley // Happiness Ambassador

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