CVC Word Family Dot Pages

Enjoy these FREE CVC Word Family Dot Pages with your learners.

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A Cautionary Tale of Word Families

One of the books I read when getting certified in Dyslexia and LBLD in 2018-2019 was a book by Rollanda E. O’Connor called Teaching Word Recognition.  In it, she cautions against the overuse of teaching reading by word families. On p. 63-64  of her second edition, she says:

The problem for poor readers who practice word families as the dominant approach to reading is that they may fail to notice the sequence of letters. When [poor readers] practiced lists in word families, they did not need to attend to the visual letter string that formed the rhyme; they only needed to look at the first letter in the word and guess the word’s identity.”

Italicized words are mine.

Now, I would not advise everyone to throw out word families completely. I think they do serve a purpose in helping readers begin to see that words share common chunks.

Instead, I would say that we need to be sure that we are teaching our readers how to sound out words as a string of letters and blend them together instead of only focusing on word families.

CVC Word Family Dot Pages

That’s where these CVC Word Family Dog Pages can come in handy! On each line/page, learners are first asked to sound through the word, letter by letter BEFORE they are asked to read it by its word family.

For example, in the first column in the image above, learners would say, /m/-/a/-/p/ as they sound through and dot each letter. In the second column, learners would then chunk the word, separating the onset from the rime: /m/-/ap/.

Once they’ve blended the sounds together, learners would find and use dot paint to dot the correct picture in the third column.

If you don’t have dot paint, learners could use transparent math counters or even just color in each circle with crayons or colored pencils.

Download the freebie below or
login to The Library to get the two bonus pages.

Enjoy teaching!
~Becky

Find all my Word Family Printables