Word Families: Read the Carpet, Then Write the Beginning

A carpet of ten words opens this 1st grade word families worksheet: two rows of five cells, each cell a word with its beginning in dark ink and its ending in coral, split by a thin line — can, fan, pan, van, swan across the top and bat, cat, hat, mat, sat beneath, on the -an and -at sheet shown here. A dashed circle at the end of each row is for a tick once the row has been read aloud. Below the carpet are six picture cards, three across and two down (a hat, a bat, a fan, a swan, a pan, a can), each with a dashed handwriting lane in which the ending is already printed in coral. The child says the picture word, finds it on the carpet, and writes its beginning on the lane in front of the ending.

The carpet is a fluency drill and the cards are a spelling check, and the order matters: every word the child will need has been read aloud, in a family, before it has to be written. Coloring the ending and printing it on the lane keeps the task on the onset — the one or two letters that change from word to word — which is where a first grader's attention belongs when the rime is the thing being learned. Alternate cells are shaded so a finger can track along the row.

It prints on a single sheet; the lanes are three-line handwriting rules, so the letters written are full size. The read-and-circle page in this family offers three printed words per picture instead of a lane, and the carpet page stretches the reading to five rows. Word families with blends move the same layout onto two-letter beginnings.