Learning Word Families: How To Teach Onset and Rime with CVC Puzzles (130 Words Included!)

This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA. 

There’s nothing more exciting for young readers than learning word families and the ability to decode and understand new words all by themselves. This simple skill opens up the whole world of books and literature, and sets the foundation for all of their reading work in the years to come. One of the key skills to improve phonemic awareness is blending onset and rime. The onset of a word is the initial phonological unit (usually a single letter, but students will need to know that digraphs are common onsets), while the rime is the latter part of the word, usually a vowel (or vowel team) and a group of consonants. In this all-in-one packet, you’ll get over 130 CVC words that help with learning word families based on onsets and rime groupings. 

Pre-Requisite Skills For Onset and Rime

As an early literacy teacher, you need to know how to teach onset and rime in a logical teaching sequence. Make sure that students have mastered their letter sounds and have a good bank of sight words to help them make sense of longer sentences and books before attempting onset-rime segmentation. Students need to be able to understand that each word is made up of different letters and need to be able to hear the different sounds in order to practice blending onset and rime. These simple word puzzles improve phonemic awareness by providing multiple opportunities for segmenting words into their onset and rime, and can be used both as a listening, reading and writing literacy center.

Preparing CVC Onset Rime Puzzles

For this activity you will need:

Paper

Printer

Scissors

Optional: laminator

If you don’t have the materials needed, don’t sweat! You can get it delivered to your doorstep really quickly with Amazon Prime. You can get a 30-day free trial here.

Teaching With CVC Onset Rime Puzzles

Only a handful of kindergarten students will be able to complete these addition and subtraction worksheets for kindergarten independently. To help scaffold the activity to get success for everyone, try some of these activities:

• Act it out – acting it out keeps the storytelling aspect of word problems alive, and you’ll never see higher engagement from your students as they pretend to be the characters in the word problem. You can teach a lot of social skills about turn-taking and make-believe while helping them visualize the word problem, as well as having some fun working out how to make oranges roll off a table or finding robots for a shelf. 

• Draw pictures – while most students will enjoy the fine motor practice of cutting out the images on the right-hand side of each worksheet to manipulate, there will be more artistic-minded students who want to draw the word problem. This should be encouraged as it will be an excellent strategy as they move the grades and the word problems become more complex. 

• Repeat the reading – finally, you can work with students on each page and underline the tricky words (often the key nouns and verbs). Rehearse these words with them using flashcards so that when you come to the worksheet in future weeks, they can read and solve the problem themselves. If you’re worried that they’ll remember the equation instead of solving the word problem, simply white out the numbers and choose your own. 

This all in one packet of over 130 CVC word families will be your new go to literacy center all year long so download it today to take your reading lessons to the next level. 

>>> Grab the CVC Onset Rime Puzzles! <<<

More CVC Teaching Resources

Looking for more ways to CVC words? I’ve got you covered!

Perfect for kindergarten and first grade students as homework, morning work, or ELA centers in the classroom! I’ve also got plenty of digital (no-prep!) task cards available!

Other Printables That Work On Learning CVCs:

1) Rhyme Time with Penguin CVC Clip Cards – Any winter literacy station that has penguins will be instantly engaging to the majority of your students. These kindergarten penguin theme CVC rhyming printable will have them practicing their short vowel and consonant sounds all season long.

2) Christmas CVC Read and Match– This fun Christmas printable activity can be used as a simple yet effective early reading center. In this free CVC printable game students look at each of the pictures and find a match from the three words listed by the side. This Christmas CVC words literacy center comes ready to print and play!

3) Space CVC Vowel Sorting – Kids will love this simple space-themed vowel sorting activity. Which planet does the object belong on? Sound it out loud for some out of this world fun!

Browse My Most Popular Literacy Activites:

1) Valentines Alphabet Clip Strips – Kids will choose among 5 different letters on the strip to identify the matching ones.

2) Alphabet Beginning Sound Coloring Pages – Watch your child become more familiar with each letter of the alphabet as they practice coloring in the objects with that beginning sound.

3) Tommy Turkey’s Alphabet Pie – This turkey-themed letter recognition activity is so simple to prep and makes a great file folder game!

4) Pirate Alphabet Playdough Mats – Just print out the playing mats and ask your child to form the letters out using the playdough provided.

5) Farm Alphabet Find and Cover Letters – Work on letter recognition any time of the year!

6) Werewolf Spin and Cover – Kids will race to find all the letters on their mat this Halloween.

7) Bunny Burrows Game – Fun game for small groups or circle time where students will catch a bunny and say out the sound.

8) Letter-saurus Fossil Digging – Dinosaur lovers will enjoy being a pretend paleontologist and finding all the letters.

9) Alphabet Handwriting Worksheets – Practice lowercase and capital letters with these print-and-go pages.

10) Rainy Day Alphabet – 1 printable, many ways to use.

>>> Grab the CVC Onset Rime Puzzles! <<<