Word Family Carpet: Read Five Rows, Then Color Each Picture's Word

Five rows of five make a carpet of twenty-five words on this 1st grade word family carpet page — on the sheet shown, the -an, -at, -ock, -ug and -og families: can, fan, pan, van, swan; bat, cat, hat, mat, sat; clock, lock, rock, sock, dock; jug, mug, rug, slug, bug; dog, frog, log, fog, hog. Each cell prints the beginning in dark ink and the ending in coral, and a dashed circle ends every row for a tick once it is read. Under the carpet sit six picture cards, each with a colored dot beside the picture: a fan with pink, a bat with brown, a sock with green, a swan with purple, a slug with yellow, a frog with red. The child reads the whole carpet aloud, then finds each picture's word and colors that cell in the picture's color.

This is the fluency face of the family. The carpet is more than twice the base page's, and reading all of it before any coloring is the point — twenty-five short words across five rimes, read in order, is a minute of decoding practice with the rime held constant and the onset changing. The coloring is the check that the reading was real: the six targets come from at least three different rows, so the child has to locate a word by reading it, not by counting down one column.

It prints on one sheet and needs six colors of crayon or pencil. Use it once the read-and-write and read-and-circle pages for two families are done, as the page that mixes families. Because the carpet fans by family, a different set of rows can be printed for the next week.