Word Families with Blends: Write the Two Letters the Word Starts With

Two letters go on the line instead of one on this 1st grade word families with blends page. The carpet at the top holds ten words that start with a consonant blend, the blend in dark ink and the rest in coral — flag, crab, drum, swan, blocks across the top row and clock, frog, glass, stamp, truck on the second, on the sheet shown. Six picture cards follow (a truck, a drum, a clock, a swan, a flag, a frog), each with a dashed handwriting lane in which the ending is printed in coral: uck, um, ock, an, ag, og. The child reads the carpet aloud, says each picture word, finds it, and writes the two-letter blend on the lane.

The rime is no longer the unit being learned; the blend is. Each carpet on this face is a ladder of five blends — fl, cr, dr, sw, bl on this sheet, with cl, fr, gl, st, tr and further ladders on the others — so the endings vary from word to word while the beginnings share a shape: two consonants, both heard. Printing the ending on the lane keeps the writing to those two letters, and a child who writes only one of them has shown the teacher which blend still sounds like a single letter to them.

Print it after the single-consonant word family sheets, when onsets are reliable and blends are being introduced. The layout is the base page's, so the routine is already known: carpet first, cards second. One portrait sheet with full-size handwriting lanes.