Memorial Day Word Families Worksheet

A word family is the fastest shortcut a beginning reader gets: learn -ake once and you can suddenly read bake, cake, lake, make and rake without sounding out a single one of them from scratch. The Memorial Day Word Families Worksheet puts that shortcut to work on a holiday your class is already talking about. Fifteen short words sit in one box at the top of the page, and the child reads each one, hears the ending, and writes it into the family it belongs to.

The page holds three families – -ake, -ell and -ar – with five roomy writing lines under each one, sized for first grade handwriting rather than squeezed in. The words in the box are printed in alphabetical order on purpose, so the answers never run straight down the columns and a child cannot finish the page by copying from top to bottom. Every word belongs to exactly one family, so the sheet has one right answer per word and a complete answer key on the second page.

What’s Included

• One printable page with a fifteen word box and three word family columns
• Five wide writing lines under each family, sized for first grade handwriting
• A full answer key on the final page
• Name and date fields and a clean, ink friendly print layout

Three Reasons This Helps Kids

• It turns decoding into pattern finding. A child who spots the -ell in bell can read sell, fell, tell and well the same second.
• It builds rhyming ears as well as reading eyes. Sorting by ending is the same skill that lets a child hear a rhyme in a song or a poem.
• It gives handwriting a reason. Writing each word, rather than circling it, moves the pattern from recognition into production.

Ideas for Teachers and Parents

Read the box aloud together first and let the class clap on the ending sound before anyone picks up a pencil. When the page is finished, ask each child to add one more word of their own to the bottom of a column and read it to a partner. For a small group, cut a copy of the box into fifteen slips and sort them on the table before writing anything down. This 1st grade rhyming worksheet also makes a calm Memorial Day literacy centre while the rest of the week runs on parades, picnics and stories about remembering. Keep a finished copy in a folder and pull it back out when a new family such as -op or -at comes up, so students can see that the same trick works every time. The Memorial Day Word Families Worksheet prints in black and white just as clearly, which makes it easy to send home for extra practice.

Related Resources

• Spelling Word Families Worksheet
• Letter A Word Families Worksheet
• Finding Rhyming Words Worksheet
• 44 Sounds of the English Language Video Lesson