Word Family Houses

It’s such an exciting time when your child learns to recognise letters and understands that blending them together can make words – we’re working at just this level at the moment and with T we’re happily recognising and blending to make CVC words and working on our first CVCC words as well. This week’s theme for the bloggers of The Early Education team (see our posts on all social media by following #TeachECE) is all about neighbourhood and to help T with her blending we have some word family houses and the people that live in them including a FREE PRINTABLE.

Materials Needed

Download and Print the Word Family Houses Sheet
Laminator
Dry Wipe Marker

Learning Objectives

• To recognise phonemes and sound them out
• Blend the phonemes to make words and read the words out loud

Preparation

Download the Word Family Houses Sheet and print – it contains a boy and girl character as well as 3 neighbourhood houses. If you want to work on more than 3-word families at a time then print out page 2 multiple times.

Cut out around the houses and children.

Laminate so that you can reuse with different phonemes and endings. If you don’t have a laminator you could use contact paper or print out multiple houses and children to work on the whole alphabet and different word families.

Why not try this CVC Word Building Blocks Activity too to help your child with learning to read.

Sounding out and Blending Words

We are working on the letters f and m at the moment as T confuses the f and t when written down and the m and n sound. But, as the characters are laminated we can erase and reuse for other phonemes and sounds (not sure what we mean by a phoneme then check out our explanation of Phoneme’s Diagraphs and Trigraphs).

I then added some word family endings to the houses – it doesn’t matter whether the phonemes and word families you have chosen actually make words at the early stages of reading (and especially if you are based in the UK where at the end of year 1 children have a phonics test where they have to read pseudowords and real words testing their phonics skills).

We then took the children to each house in turn and sounded out the words and then blended them together to read the word we had made. Check out T and I playing with the word family houses above.

Check out our other word family game – where you can land the rocket on the word family planets to read and create the words.

Other Neighbourhood Ideas from the Early Education Team

Check out these other hands-on learning activities from the Early Education Team

7 Ways to Grow a Reader on a Neighborhood Walk from Growing Book by Book

Community Helpers Bingo Alphabet Activity by Mom Inspired Life

Word Family Houses from Rainy Day Mum

The Big Orange Splot Activity by Capri +3

Community Helpers Theme for Preschool: Bubbly Fires Science Activity! from The Preschool Toolbox

My Neighbourhood Preschool Math Color Sorting by Learning 2 Walk

Fireman Playdough Printable by Life Over C’s

Kid Made Neighborhood Blocks from Still Playing School