Word Family: Free Sticker Templates

What I thought was simple rhyming ends up being associated with a bunch of hoity-toity educational lingo such as: "word families," "emerging reader," "cvc words- consonant - vowel - consonant," and "hfw- high frequency words." Remember, I'm more familiar with the secondary ed lingo, so this is all new stuff for me!

My primary hesitation in homeschooling was having the be the sole instructor for teaching my kid to read. I understand the repercussions of this task, and it just seems overwhelming to me. But slowly I'm learning.

Caleb and I are now working on blending sounds to make words. We are using some of the manipulatives from Sonlight Core A, and the word ladders from Erica @ Confessions of a Homeschooler. But I also found this great idea from Nurture Creek on how to use plastic easter eggs to accomplish the same task. You place the beginning of the word on the left side of the egg, with a single ending on the right side of the egg. When the kids twist the egg they can visually see what part of the word stays the same, what changes. 

While most of you probably have wonderful handwriting and can use permanent marker to write the letters directly on the plastic egg, that's not really an option for me. Therefore, I typed up a variety of word families and formatted them so I could print them out on Avery 8160 Mailing Labels. Below is a description of how I assembled the eggs for use. 

Plastic Easter Egg Word Family Assembly Tutorial 

Gather materials:

• Plastic Easter Eggs (I chose the bigger size eggs)
• Avery 8160 Mailing Labels
• Clear Packing Tape
• Word Family pdf file (available for download at the end of this post)
• Scissors and/or paper cutter 
• permanent marker

1. Print out Word Family file onto Avery 8160 stickers. (I printed mine on regular paper first, placed it behind a sticker sheet, held it up to the light, to make sure the letters were going to print out correctly.)
2. Carefully cover the stickers with clear packing tape being sure to not wrinkle the tape.

I decided to use packing tape because it was quick, and easy to cut with my paper cutter. I could have just as easily laminated 2 of the sticker sheets back-to-back, with letters facing the outside. This would accomplish the same thing.   

3.  Using a paper cutter or scissors, cut rows as close to the letter as possible (if the stickers are too big they won't curve well around your egg). Each row represents one family and should fit on one egg.

4.  Use scissors to separate the beginning and ending word. In the print out you should notice that the end of the word is in bold. 

5.  Remove the sticker backing and place the beginning of the words on the left side of the egg, and the end of the word (only one sticker) on the right half of the egg. Make sure the two halves can move freely, with no label sticking to the opposite half.  

 6.  Because I am confident that the "tops" and "bottoms" of the eggs won't remain with their original pair, I used a permanent marker to write the appropriate word ending on the inside of the left half of the egg. That way, when the egg pieces are all in a pile, my kids (not me!) can find the correct halves to match up again.   

I used these word family stickers to put on plastic easter eggs, but I'm sure there are many other ways you could use this free download. Please share with me how you end up using it!

The free download includes 4 pages of word families with a single family being in one row. To download the Google Doc (pdf file) click HERE or the graphic below. 

Thanks for visiting,
Darci the STEM Mom