Phonics Printable Worksheets and Activities
(Word Families)

© Contributed by Leanne Guenther

There are differences in opinion about whether using phonics is useful in
teaching children to read.  My personal opinion is that everyone learns
differently — try a variety of things with your kids until you find what works
for them.  My oldest daughter just sort of magically read books — natural
ability and lots of family reading time were the causes I think — she didn’t
often sound out words or enjoy playing word games.  My younger daughter was
very keen on phonics lessons and constantly asked to play rhyming word games and
activities.  Word families really appealed to her and to this day (grade 6)
she enjoys word based “puzzles” like word searches and crosswords (my
eldest daughter would rather play soccer *grin*).  My advice:  good
luck, don’t get frustrated and try to have fun learning with your kids — just
when you think you have it all figured out, the next one will be completely
different.  If you decide word families (also known as analogy phonics)
might be something you’d like to try, read on!

When approaching word families, I like to learn them in sets that have some commonality
(for example, short a sounds or long e sounds).  I find it easier for kids
to make up their own rhymes, sentences and such when they have two or three
word families to use together.  Having said that, I do sometimes do a
single word family when I find the kids are struggling with something in
particular — the first time we did long vowels instead of short vowels for
example.

I also try to keep word families that are too similar in different groups
(example, I wouldn’t do the “long a” /air/ and /are/ word families together). 
With my girls I found that they got too confused when words sounded the
same, but were spelled differently (like ‘hare’ and ‘hair’).  I saved
that type of learning for grade 4 and 5 when we started talking about
synonyms, antonyms and homonyms.

Anyways, here are the Word Family sets as I would suggest combining them.

• Lower Case Letters Flash Cards
  • a thru f   (color)  
    (B&W)
      
  • g thru l   (color)  
    (B&W)
      
  • m thru r   (color)  
    (B&W)
      
  • s thru x    (color)  
    (B&W)
      
  • y and z    (color)  
    (B&W)