13 Free CVC Worksheets and Word Family Activities

Get your child reading with these CVC worksheets and word family activities.  Designed to support phonics in kindergarten, these CVC worksheets and activities include everything you need bridge your instruction from letter sounds to phoneme segmentation and building fluency.

What are CVC Word Families?

CVC word families, also known as phonograms, are groups of words that share the same rime, but have different onsets.

An onset is the initial sound of a word, and a rime is the vowel and consonant(s) that follow.  The et word family, for example, would consist of words such as wet, get, set, bet, jet, etc.

After learning to identify and produce letter sounds, exposure to cvc worksheets and cvc activities will help build phonological awareness and decoding skills – both very important for reading fluency in kindergarten and first grade.

When are CVC Word Families Taught?

CVC word families are introduced after mastery of the alphabet letters and sounds.

As a kindergarten teacher, I focused heavily on cvc words, phoneme segmentation, and word families during second half of the school year.  More intense word family instruction is carried throughout the first grade.  I created CVC word family printable resources, and CVC word games,  as a supplemental to our weekly word family instruction and assessments.

CVC Decodable Books

The cvc decodable books are excellent for guided reading, mini-lessons, and shared reading lessons.  The text is large, which helps with concepts of print, such as tracking print and pointing to the words.  The pictures are simple and clear of clutter, to help the readers apply reading strategies, such as using the pictures when stuck on a word.

Revisit the word family books throughout the week.  Let’s look at a simple schedule for revisiting the books to build repetition and fluency. This schedule does not need be on consecutive days.  You can do these activities back or back, or choose to skip days in between.

Day 1: Do a book walk, and build vocabulary when talking about the pictures.  Then, echo read with the kiddos.

Day 2:  Ask students to recall the word family words from the book (net, vet, etc).  Do a shared reading.  Then, have the students highlight the word family word on each page.

Day 3: Have the kiddos do partner reading and read to self during your Daily 5 reading block.

At the end of the week, I allowed my students to take the books home to read to their family, or keep them in their book boxes in the classroom. I change out my book boxes from year to year.  I have used both magazine holders and ziploc resealable bags as storage for all of their decodable books.  Both, were great storage solutions for the classroom.

CVC Word Cards

The word family picture cards were displayed on  my ELA focus wall at the start of each week.

Word Family House

After introducing the word cards, the kids write the words on the My ___ Word Family House cvc worksheet.  I would send this home on Mondays.  This way, they could show their family what the words are for the week – just in case the parents missed the newsletter.

CVC Picture and Word Cards

These cvc picture and word cards are great for a pocket chart activity, early-finisher task, morning activity box, or take-home activity. Each word card has the same color border as it’s matching picture – excellent for self-checking center.

If you’re looking for a quick and simple CVC matching game, this free resource is perfect!

Write and Illustrate CVC Words

The “Write and Illustrate” cvc worksheet is good for shared writing, mini-lessons, centers, and homework.  Students pick any one of the 5 focus words, write it in the box at the top, then write a sentence using that word. When done, they draw a picture to match the sentence.

CVC Sound Boxes

The leveled “Sound Boxes” cvc worksheets are excellent for phoneme segmentation. Students say the word, tap the sound boxes to segment the word, then write the word.

Building CVC Words

Students use the letter tiles on the right to make 3 words from the list of 5 focus words. When done, they draw a picture to represent one of the words.  Then, either a peer or the teacher has to guess the picture.

This reinforces using detail when illustrating, and the kids get a kick out of trying to draw SO good that they don’t even have to write the word.

CVC Word Family Match-up

Word Family Match-up goes beyond the 5 focus cvc words for the week.  This cvc worksheet builds visual discrimination, phoneme segmentation, and accuracy.  Students read the cvc words, then draw a line to the word on the right.

CVC Assessments

Finally, at the end of the week, I assessed each student individually on the 5 Word Family focus words.

You could administer the cvc reading assessment as a whole class, but I prefer one-on-one assessments to assure accuracy, and to be able to watch/listen to their thoughts (mumbles) as they practiced phoneme segmentation and blending.

For the cvc writing assessment, the teacher says the word for each picture, then the student writes the word independently.  There is a section for notes at the bottom – great to communicate/document and concerns or patterns observed.

Free CVC Worksheets and Activities

When you choose to teach your little learners how to blend and read, my CVC Bundle has worksheets and activities broken down into individual word families.

Grab your FREE CVC packet today, and check it out for yourself!

CVC Activities for the Year

Take the stress out of planning your CVC activities from week to week with my CVC Bundle.

This 425 page printable packet has everything you need to teach and assess 17 CVC word families, including _ad, _ag, _at, _ap, _an, _ig, _ill, _ip, _in, _it, _og, _op, _ot, _et, _en, _un, and _ug. Yes, friends, every resource mentioned in this post is included for each word family.  Simply find your word family and print!  You’ll have what you need year after year! 

Before you go, here are a few blog posts you may be interested in:

3 Fun CVC Word Games

All About Word Families

115 Top Picks for Poem of the Day

CVC Worksheets