word families

On Monday and Tuesday, my class started looking at the word family, at.  This happened to be our sight word of the week and we had a lot of fun using it to build other words.  We are learning how letters can work together to make word chunks.  This week, we used the word chunk and substituted various letters at the beginning of the word at to create different words.  Recognizing word chunks helps beginning readers read and spell new words rapidly.  This week we have read a variety of books that include many -at family words and created a list of these words.  We have created sentences and illustrated them (I sat on the fat rat.), we made word sliders with paper plates (have your child show you how this works when they bring it home), filled a house with -at words, played at family bingo, and memory.