Word Families for Early and Advanced Readers |

Is your child struggling with reading longer words? Or maybe you want to boost their vocabulary without drilling flashcards?
 This week on Falling for Learning, we explore how recognizing word patterns—from simple three letter words to longer multi-syllabic words. 

Give it a listen—you'll walk away with practical, easy-to-try strategies that support real literacy growth at any age.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts!
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Transcript

TD Flenaugh: 0:00

Is your child struggling with reading, or are you trying to expand their vocabulary without doing a bunch of flashcards? Well, today we're going to talk about word families for early and advanced readers. So you want to stick around like and subscribe. You don't want to miss this episode. You TD, hi, thank you so much for joining the Falling for Learning Podcast. I am TD Flenaugh, we have this podcast to help parents and caregivers with having the resources, strategies and tools needed to make sure that their children are on track for learning and to stay on track for success. Welcome. Okay, so today, let's talk about word families. Now, before we get into that, we're going to be talking about recognizing patterns. So of course, this is April, we have Poetry Month, and I almost forgot about this, but I recently went to a professional development with my composing and computing collaborative right. Shout out to the California writing project, and so I'm going to read the housewife's lament, because obviously there's some rhyming there and recognizing patterns really important. I have not been a housewife before, but I just thought this was it in, you know, a poem that I could read one day I was walking. This is by Eliza Sproat Turner, okay. One day I was walking, I heard a complaining and saw an old woman, the picture of gloom. She looked at the mud on her doorstep. TD, was raining, and this was her song as she wielded her broom. Okay, there's too many hours we spend getting ready. Days of Our Lives been ironing a shirt. There's nothing that pays back time wasted already, nothing that lasts but trouble and dirt and march it so muddy and slush. In December, the mid summer breezes are loaded with dust. In fall, the leaves litter and clutter September, the wallpaper rots and the faucets all rest. There's worms on the cherries and slugs on the roses, ants in the sugar and mice in the pies. The spiders wreak havoc right under our noses. The roaches disgust me and those flies. It's sweeping at six, and it's dusting at seven, breakfast at eight, and dishes at nine. It's potting and panning from 10 to 11, we scarce break our fast till we plan how to dine. And the last part, last night in my dreams, I was stranded forever on a rock in the midst of the sea. My one chance of life was a ceaseless endeavor to sweep off the waves as they swept over me. But I wasn't dreaming, just rudely awakened. I see that it's helpless my fate to avert she lay down her broom, she folded her apron. She laid down and died and was buried in dirt. I don't know it's pretty dark, but anyway, recognizing patterns. Okay, so we're going to get into it. I do have a little thing behind me because, of course, I'm going to take it to the board. My like, little cheap, you know, a post it poster. So we're gonna be talking about word families now, yes, it is a little slanted, but I'm not about perfection anymore. I'm recovering. I'm gonna move on. Okay, okay, so let's get to it. Okay, so we're going to start with very simple, right? Always go from simple. I'm going to put this here the word in so as we are having our young readers build words in it, right? And then we give them these little post its you could also do this with magnetic or whatever, but this is, like the poor person's way to do this. And you know, shout out to one of the teachers that I work with. She gave us this little hack, and I love it. So here we go, so we could have them build families with this. Of course, you want to do it a little bit closer or whatever, right? So would be in been, right? Then you can do in sin, right? So. Uh, deep in and a lot of kids don't know what that means. It's just like, sounds like, you know, there's a den, a slight den, of diners inside of the restaurant, right? Then sound okay. And then there is thin. And again, I, I, you know, that's one of the tricks. You gotta make sure you position it right on here. F I N N, helping the kids to blend it, recognizing this pattern, they can make lots of words with this. Now I'm going to start in, expanding so there is in. And then, of course, you want to put at the end of it another sound. So we go from a three letter word to a four letter word. In this case, I want to do hint. So I'm going to and you could ask learners, what would I add to make this word it's in hen. How do you make it hint? Right? And you could ask them. They may tell you, if they're ready, they would add, they would tell you the T or that sound right, so they have the word hint. Okay, let's take some of this down again. Of course, you could have the word tin right, just moving around those just changing it one letter at a time. Then we have when. Now, sometimes when we have words like this, kids will bring up words that actually aren't part of the word family, like the word went, and in that case, I'll write went for them and say, Oh, it sounds like it, but it actually is not. It doesn't follow the rules. I mean it follows a different set of rules. The word is when, so it doesn't follow it, when it doesn't go, I got confused. Went, went, right, yeah. So you get you, you, they expand their knowledge so don't you know, acknowledge what they're saying. Like, Oh, that's, that's one of those other words, and it's and it's not, and it's fine, you explain it to them. So here we go. I know I have 10. I'm going to put T at the end again, int, and I'm going to add f, l, Flint. Shout out to my dad. Is one of his nicknames Flint. And even if you want to even expand it further, I'm going to do three letters in the front sprint, right, so they have a six letter word, and kids are feeling more confident because they know this int, and they're able just to add other things to it. I'm going to take it off and then go back and just add two letters in the front of in, and we have spin in, okay, hmm, I'm going to go ahead and again, add an H in front so we have hen hinters are Coming Apart, but it's fine. It's fine. Hint okay. Then there is the GL, oh, well, let me do it at the L, you have a lint, and some kids may say tent. So tent also works. But they may be thinking about tint like when you go camping, and again you write it for them. This is tint t, e n t for camping. This tint is like hair tint like I tinted my hair. And then there is also glint. Okay, so these are all different ways that you can build these words, right, showing them how to build it again. You could do it with magnetic letters. This is just a way to do this quickly and easily to show you. And after the break, we're going to show you a way to expand it with older readers. All right. Stay tuned for our sponsor, the rewrite method and the rewrite method workbook are your go to resource for helping kids to learn to fall in love with writing. It has the tips, tools, resources, strategies and skill building activities to help kids fall out of writing and into loving. To write, get your book set to. Today. Okay, we're back so we have some of those words written down that we had earlier. Good. So we're now going to talk about how we could do this with more advanced words. So I'm going to go to the word form. So we're going to make a little space here the word form. So this is a more advanced word, knowing that the or makes the or sound is, you know, a little bit more advanced, and then making multi syllabic words, words that have multiple syllables to help them. So, of course, we have the word in so we could go ahead and take that right away, and we can have inform right, and explaining to them what these different word parts mean, right? We could also have reform perform so now we have a three syllable word, okay, so multiple ways to make you know long words. So again, I'm going to go back to inform, and then I'm going to add Asian information, right? So we can get students to in for May shun before syllable word, helping them to understand, recognizing these patterns throughout is the very key in helping them to sound out words, letting them know what the base of this word means, and the suffixes, the suffixes will go the end of the words and the prefixes, helping them To understand, you know how to recognize those patterns and sound out the words. You can even make some some nonsense words with the kids, as long as you're teaching them the meaning of the prefix and the suffixes and the base word is very easy to help them to transfer their information to many, many, many different multi syllabic words. So words with multiple syllables how to recognize them and read them, and then they can start using it in a sentence, then challenging them to write with it. So it gives them so many limitless opportunities for them to build on one thing that they know and to exponentially increase their vocabulary, their reading vocabulary, their speaking vocabulary, and even how they're able to spell words or write them correctly. So there's multiple things that you can do when you're thinking about word families, helping students to recognize these patterns and transfer them to the text that they're reading again. Testing season will be coming up very soon for certain children, and we know we are not able to help. Teachers are not able to help. Testing is on them. It's them really soaring or finding that they need they have a challenge in a certain area with words that they already know and with the knowledge they already know and able to apply it to new text, new challenges that they haven't seen before. So I appreciate you for joining us today. Hopefully you're doing something today that is giving your child the competitive advantage. Thanks again for supporting the falling for learning podcast. New Episodes go live every Saturday at 5pm you can watch us on youtube.com, at falling for learning or listen on all major podcast platforms such as Apple, Google, Audible, Spotify and much more for more resources, visit falling in love with learning.com. We really appreciate you. Have a wonderful week.