Word family worksheets

A word family is the most economical thing in early reading: learn one ending and you can read every word that uses it. The child who works out “-op” has hop, mop, pop, top, drop, stop, shop and flop, which is eight words for the price of one — and blending a beginning onto an ending, rather than sounding out a word letter by letter, is the step that makes reading start to move.

The beginnings include blends as well as single letters, and that is where this sheet earns its second half. Going from “c + at” to “fl + at” means holding two sounds together before the ending, which is the thing a child stalls on for months after single letters are easy. Every answer on this page is a real word — checked, because a sheet whose key contains “jat” teaches a child not to trust the sheet.

The answers were decided when the sheet was built, so the key is the same page with them drawn in rather than a second attempt at the same questions — there is no way for the two to disagree. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from: it is printed so that the identical sheet can be had again next week, rather than one that merely looks like it.

This page is one sheet out of a family that can print thousands. The topic is a setting rather than a different worksheet: ten of them — rhyme, syllables, word families, prefixes and suffixes, plurals, contractions, homophones, synonyms and antonyms — and each is asked in whichever of the three shapes suits it, written on a ruled line, circled from four, or joined up in two columns. How many questions and how many columns are switches beside them.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

Word Jungle deals the sight-word lists as flash cards: the word is read aloud, in a sentence, and typed back — which is the half of spelling a worksheet cannot do, because paper cannot say a word out loud. A child who has just worked through a page is the one likeliest to race it, and the record book then knows which words they keep missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.