Word Families Teaching Resources

Save time on your English lesson planning with word families activities, worksheets, games, and more printable and digital teaching resources for primary school teachers! Put a fresh spin on your reading lessons with ready-made resources designed to engage and delight your students. This collection of teaching resources from Teach Starter’s teacher team has options to help you cut down on the time-consuming task of lesson planning and help your primary class –all aligned with the Australian English curriculum. With editable options for many of the collection’s resources, save yourself a tonne of time with these ready-made ways to explore word families.

New to this section of the English curriculum or just looking for a fresh way to approach the topic? Take a peek at this primer from our reading experts!

What Are Word Families?

Word families are groups of words that have a common feature or pattern. They are often used in teaching reading and spelling, as they can help our students learn words more easily by recognising the patterns within them. For example, the word family for the word “run” would include "bun", "sun", "fun", etc. Word families can also be useful for teaching vocabulary, as words within a word family tend to have similar meanings and can be used in similar contexts, such as "run", "runner", and "running".

Teaching Word Families

Teaching word families encourages students to identify onset and rime (the phonological units of a word). The onset consists of the initial consonant or consonant blend. While the rime consists of the vowel and any final consonants. For example r/ake, b/ake, m/ake, sh/ake.

One of our favourite hands-on learning tools to use when teaching word families is the Word Family Paper Cups. They are ridiculously easy to make, can be used time and time again, and are the perfect tool to use in small groups!