Kindergarten Spelling Words - CVC Word Family Charts and Worksheets

Kindergarten spelling words: CVC word families

Fifteen printable pages covering 29 word families and 160 words — a master chart, a page for each short vowel, build-a-word practice, missing vowels, rhyming pairs and sentences, with an answer key.

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Teach the family, not the word

A child who learns cat has learned one word.

A child who learns -at has learned a machine: bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat, vat. Nine words for the effort of one, and the next time they meet an unfamiliar word ending in -at they can read it without being taught it.

This is why early reading accelerates so suddenly for some children and not others. Words learned one at a time add up slowly. Families multiply.

What a CVC word is

Consonant, vowel, consonant — the simplest word shape in English, and the first one worth teaching because every letter says its most common sound. No silent letters, no vowel teams, nothing to explain away.

c-a-t. Three sounds, three letters, in order. A child who can blend those three can read a third of the words on an early reading page.

The 29 families

Grouped by vowel, because the vowel is the part children find hardest:

• short a — -ab, -ad, -ag, -am, -an, -ap, -at
• short e — -ed, -eg, -en, -et
• short i — -ib, -id, -ig, -im, -in, -ip, -it
• short o — -ob, -od, -og, -op, -ot
• short u — -ub, -ud, -ug, -um, -un, -ut

Short e and short i are the pair children confuse most — pen and pin, bed and bid. They are worth separating in time: teach one thoroughly, then the other, rather than both in the same week.

What is in the download

1. The whole list — all 29 families and 160 words on one page. Keep this one; the rest are the practice.
2. Five family pages, one per short vowel, with room to add words of your own.
3. Five build-a-word pages — first sound plus family, and the child writes the word.
4. Fill in the missing vowel — 24 words with the vowel removed.
5. Match the rhyming words — words in the same family rhyme, which is the whole point made visible.
6. Finish the sentence — ten sentences, each answer a CVC word.
7. Answer key for everything that has a right answer.

How to use them

1. Say the sounds, don't spell the letters. "c–a–t", not "see-ay-tee". Letter names are no help at all when blending; sounds are the whole skill.
2. One family at a time. Finish -at before starting -an. Mixing families early is what makes the vowel confusing.
3. Read before writing. A child should be able to read the family aloud before being asked to spell from it.
4. Come back to the chart. The master list is a reference, not a test. Pinning it up is more useful than working through it.

A note on the word list

Every word here is a real word a five-year-old can be told is correct — that is the point of building from families rather than from a spelling list. Words that make a family technically but that no young child needs have been left out.