Boost reading and spelling skills with CVC word family towers. Use building blocks to make towers of rhyming words and learn to identify common word families.

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Identifying rhyming patterns is an important step in reading development. This activity is great for CVC (consonant – vowel – consonant) reading practice and will help to identify common word families.

What is a word family? Words that rhyme because they share the same middle and end letter pattern. For example – sun, fun, pun, run.

For this activity:

1. Identify different word families of CVC words. I suggest starting with the following word families:

• set, yet, met, bet
• rot, dot, not, cot
• mat, sat, hat, cat

2. Write each word on a post-it note, cut it out and stick it onto a building block. 
3. Scatter the blocks around and ask your child to try reading each word. 
4. After reading the words, ask if they can spot any patterns in the words. Are there any rhyming words? How do we know words are rhyming?
5. Begin to build towers of each set of rhyming words. Can any other words be added to the towers? Add them to any unused blocks.
6. Once your child has mastered CVC words, challenge them by doing this activity with CVCC words (duck, luck, muck, suck, tuck etc.).