Word Family Snowball Toss

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Word families can be a beneficial component in your teaching-your-child-to-read toolbox.

To put it simply, word families are words that rhyme. Teaching children word families is a phonemic awareness activity that helps children see patterns in reading. This is an important skill because it allows children to begin “reading” by grouping sets of letters within a word. The first part of a word is called the onset and the last part of the word is conveniently called the rime (yes, spelled r-i-m-e, not r-h-y-m-e…it’s a bit confusing). Word families share a similar “rime” as the onset changes.

Once your child recognizes the word “mop”, he’ll then have an advantage to reading all of the other words that have the same rime (top, pop, stop, cop, hop) because only one letter is changing. Plus, recognizing rhyming words is a great language skill in and of itself!

This word family snowball toss activity combines decoding and gross motor fun…the perfect blend for kiddos who have a hard time sitting still!

Here’s what you’ll need: ping pong balls, 4 small containers, a dry-erase marker and a permanent marker.