Word Families Teaching Resources

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

New to this section of the ELA 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 recognizing the patterns within them. For example, the word family for the word “run” would include “ran,” “running,” “runner,” 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.