Skilled readers recognize patterns in words. Word families allow children to practice rhyme and chunk letters with stable vowel sounds. Readers can also decode by analogy-use. What they know about one word can be used to decode another. If a reader knows the word tack they are likely to know other words in the -ack family such as snack or jack. With the understanding of how words are related, a student's reading and spelling vocabulary in greatly increased.
All year our children have been learning about word families. We have been practicing reading and spelling them in our Word Family books. To date we have introduced 25 word families and have several more to add to our collection. We started with the -at family last fall, working with common words like cat and bat. Today we were working with the -ug family using words like mug and slug to create silly sentences. (The big slug sat in a mug next to the rug.) The students did a great job and seemed to enjoy the challenge of making up these little poems.
More work with word families will continue and be expanded upon both for the rest of kindergarten and in first grade next year.
