Phonics Fun with Word Families

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You must be teaching a little person to read. What a fun, though demanding job!

Once your little person knows the names and sounds of all of the consonant letters, and at least the short sound of the vowels, he can successfully read a whole lot of words! Hooray! Phonics!

I created my first ‘Word Family House’ for my oldest daughter, when she was 4-years-old. She’s now 21! I never laminated it because I didn’t own a laminator at the time, so it was in tatters when it was time to teach my youngest.

(Speaking of laminators, this is the one I bought several years ago. Talk about a bargain! I laminate every. single. thing. all. the. time and it’s still going strong. I love that it’s wide enough to laminate a file folder.)

So since ours was in tatters, I needed to create a new ‘Word Family House’ to teach my youngest phonics. I figured I might as well create it digitally so I could share the printable with all of you. You can download the file below.

This house is mainly CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant) and is geared to VERY new readers. It will help build your new reader’s confidence and excitement about reading. My youngest helped choose the colors and is gaga over her pretty new ‘Word Family House’. Your child will probably zip through them willingly, too. Flashcards are for the birds!

I did include a few blends and digraphs at the end of certain letter strips. You can skip those or save them for later.

To assemble the phonics word family houses, follow these steps:

1. Print all 4 pages of the document on cardstock.  Here’s what your download will look like:

2. Cut out the house, the wheel, and the letter strips.

3.  Cut slits across the bottom and top of the window ONLY. An exacto knife or utility knife will work best. The letter strip will feed through these slits. Do NOT cut out the whole window. Refer to the photo.

4. Cut out the window inside the door (the solid black square) entirely. You want the whole square gone, unlike the slits you cut earlier.

5. Laminate for durability. You’ll have to recut the window slits after laminating, but leave the clear door-window intact. Since you cut out the window before laminating, you’ll have a nice clear window, like this:

6. Fasten the wheel to the house with a brad, centered on the x, so that one group of letters shows through the window in the door.

7. Feed letter strip through window slits, so that one letter at a time shows in the window. This is what the back will look like.

8. Each letter strip is labeled with a word family across the top, such as -am. The word family of each letter strip should match what is showing through the door-window. Feel free to practice with non-matching strips as well. A few of the resulting words will be nonsense words (not actually words) which are great practice for new readers. Just explain your method to your child, so he doesn’t think he’s reading incorrectly.

Pin this phonics word families printable activity for later!