I love incorporating educational crafts into my lessons. Students L.O.V.E. creating things and when you add in cutting and glue and you’ve got instant engagement! These Word Family craft activities are some of my favorites and I’m excited to share them with you.
The Benefits of Crafts
Using crafts in the classroom is more than just a fun activity. I love connecting our crafts directly to our lessons, but even the most random of craft activities still has lots of benefits for students.
1. Fine Motor Skills
Cutting, gluing, paper tearing, placing small pieces – these are just some of the activities you will commonly find in crafts. All of these are great fine motor activities that help students fine tune those important fine motor skills.
2. Following Directions
Unless students are given free reign to use their creativity to create something, then there are very likely going to be directions for the craft. Crafts are an excellent way for students to practice following directions.
Sometimes the concept of consequences for not following directions can be really abstract. However, with crafts, the students are able to see how not following instructions resulted in a different final product.
3. Building Analytical Thinking Skills
Sometimes I love providing my students with a finished craft example without step by step instructions. In these instances, students must exercise those analytical thinking skills in order to determine steps and procedures to recreate the final craft.
4. Building Self-Confidence
Kids love making things. And when they are done – they have such a sense of accomplishment. You can see them beam with pride as they share their creation with family and friends.
5. The Review Factor
This last benefit is what I like to call the Review Factor. When creating crafts that connect to your lessons, there is a substantial amount of lesson review that is done. If you are guiding students through the activity, you can guide the review with simple questions. But that isn’t really necessary.
I love just listening when my students are working on educational crafts. You will hear them discuss the lesson, talk about the concepts and examples, and even build a deeper level of understanding through discussion. It’s a beautiful thing to watch them learn and process the information through a craft.
Word Family Craft Activities
As a primary teacher, word families are an important part of our reading instruction. You can find out more about how I teach word families in this blog post.
We always start a new word family the same way – using an interactive anchor chart. This is a really fun and engaging way to help students build their understanding of our new word family.
But this anchor chart is more than just the lesson introduction. It comes full circle as the basis for our word family craft too!
Wrap it Up with a Craft
There’s a lot more to our word family instruction than an anchor chart and a craft, but today we are going to focus on the craft. I generally use the craft as our final activity or word family wrap-up. It’s a great way to review all the sounds and words we have learned during the week.
While I like to use it as a wrap-up activity, there’s really no right or wrong way to use the craft activities. They could be done as an engagement activity at the beginning or students could make their craft along with the building of the interaction chart.
Crafting Individual Anchor Charts
For our word family instruction, the crafts we do are individual versions of the word family anchor chart. This allows students another opportunity to internalize the word family sound, the fun characters we create with the sounds, and our new words.
Each of the word family crafts includes the word family characters. These are the word family letters turned into some cute and zany characters. For example, on this ‘it’ word family craft we have turned the letter ‘i’ into a bat and ball to represent the word hit. We turn the letter ‘t’ into a candle to represent the word lit. Each word family has it’s own characters that are designed to remind students of the word family sound.
Once students create the characters, it’s time to add some word family words. Students can use the classroom anchor chart as a reference for their words. But, they are also free to come up with their own words. This is such a great opportunity for them to really make the craft their own, adding words they have connected to the word family, even if we didn’t use those words as a class.
Sometimes students will add a word to their anchor chart that is not a real word. In those cases, I love to praise students for correctly blending the sounds to create a new word. Then we talk about the difference between real and nonsense words. I want students to understand that not all letter combinations make real words, but I also want them to know that I see their success in blending and segmenting sounds.
Word Family Craft Fun!
Over the years I have created so many different word family characters and crafts. Just check out some of the fun crafts your students will have the opportunity to create as they learn word families.
You can find all of these Word Family Craft Activities in the Emily Education store.
You can also find each of the word family anchor chart and craft sets individually.
More Educational Crafts
Word families aren’t the only times I incorporate educational crafts into our lessons. Here’s a few more lesson activities that include crafts that I know your students will love. Whether it is the word family crafts or some others, I hope you incorporate some educational craft activities into your lessons.
Save these Word Family Craft Activities
Pin this to your favorite classroom Pinterest board so you can quickly and easily come back when you need more tips and ideas for using educational craft activities in your classroom.
