Family Members: Who Is Who?

A small family tree fills the top half of this kindergarten page: two grandparents at the top, two parents in the middle and two children at the bottom, each drawn as a simple portrait in a frame and joined by lines. One child is marked with an orange star and named, Eli on the sheet shown. The other five people carry numbers from 1 to 5. Below the tree sit five family word chips, sister, mom, grandma, grandpa and dad, each with a dashed box. The child finds each person on the tree and writes their number next to the right word.

Every family word depends on who is speaking, and the star is what makes the page work: the words are all Eli's. The girl next to him is his sister, drawn a little taller because she is the older child, and the grandparents are his dad's parents, because the line from the top joins them to his dad, not his mom. A kindergartner does not need to explain that, but following the lines to find it is the beginning of reading a family tree. The portraits are simple on purpose, with glasses and gray hair for the grandparents, so children look at where people sit on the tree as well as how they look.

One sheet, one tree, five numbers. This is kindergarten to grade 2 social studies readiness; there is no Common Core standard for family words. Afterwards, ask children to draw their own family on the back and point to one person for each word they used. The trace-and-write face uses the same kind of tree with the words printed to trace, and the family tree template lets children draw their own people in the frames.