Easy and Fun Word Building Activities for Children

Do you regularly use word building activities in your homeschool? They’re a great way to improve your child’s language arts skills and they’re simply fun! Here’s what you need to know about word building activities plus several ideas to try.

Word Building Activities

Word building is being able to move beyond simply knowing the letters of the alphabet and into using those letters to form words. You can use word building activities that are hands-on in order to grow your child’s phonics skills in a fun way. You can use a variety of activities and even free printable phonics books or phonics sound cards to help build word skills. 

How do you teach word building?

You teach word building by beginning with your child’s ability and incrementally adding new skills from there. So when your child is very young and just starting to learn phonics, you will want to start with very simple CVC, or consonant/vowel/consonant, words because they will be the easiest for them to sound out. They’ll learn how to arrange the letters of the alphabet to form these simple three-letter-words.

And as your children master that foundational step with simple words, you can start to introduce blends and digraphs and vowel teams. Word building should never be frustrating for your children. Work at their pace and only introduce a new concept when they are ready for it.

What is the purpose of word building?

Word-building lessons are an essential part of learning phonics. With word building, kids learn that words can be broken down into their smaller components. They also learn that not every letter will have the same sound in other words. It helps their phonetic awareness as they manipulate words, build new words, and break words apart.

Eventually, older kids will add prefixes and suffixes onto root words to make even more complex words. But at the beginning, your younger children will just be concerned with learning how to form simple words.

What are Word Building Activities?

There are many word building activities that you can use with your kids. Here are two foundational activities that you can try.

Word Building: Blending

Blending is the ability to mentally join individual letter sounds together to make new words. So instead of saying each phoneme as a separate sound, kids need to learn to smoothly connect the sounds to read the word.

For the word cat, for example, you want your kids to be able to blend the sounds together rather than pronounce the word as three distinct and separated sounds.

Learning to read word families can help kids see how they can blend beginning or ending sounds and just change one letter to make a whole new word.

For example, look at this list and see how your kids could start to blend these ending sounds together seamlessly and simply change the beginning sound.

• cot
• lot
• bot
• spot
• trot

Or, you could approach it from the other direction and have your kids blend the first consonant and vowel, only changing the final letter sound.

• pin
• pit
• pick

Struggling readers usually have difficulties with blending, so it’s a foundational skill that you will want to help your child learn. Once they’re able to blend, your child will be able to decode new words on his own.

Word Building:  Word Awareness

Word awareness is another key aspect of phonetic skill. With word awareness, your kids are able to distinguish rhyming sounds, alliteration, and recognize syllables. This growth in understanding a word pattern and word awareness will help your children grow in their reading ability.

Word Building Activities

There are many interactive activities that you can use with your kids to practice word building. Here are a few specific word building activities that you can try.

Word Ladders

Did you know that word ladders were invented by Lewis Carroll? He’s the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He created these word games where a sequence of words is listed and each word differs only by one letter. So, the puzzle begins with a word and you finish the puzzle by changing only one letter in each adjacent word.

Word Ladder Worksheets – You’ll find dozens of printable options here, divided into fun categories like animals, seasons, and holidays.

Word Ladders – Here are 15 five-step word ladders. Titles include Space Travel, Riddle of the Ladder, and Let’s Eat Out!

Phonics Word Building

Phonics word building is so important in the early years! Here are some great printables to help you structure the teaching of this critical phonics activity.

Free Phonics Word Building – These printables are ideal for grades K-2 and will instruct kids in building and writing up to ten words with a short vowel.

CVC Word Building Mat – Here’s a practical resource that you can use over and over again. Using the CVC prompt cards included in this download, your kids will be encouraged to build, write, read, and draw simple CVC words. You can pull your supply of magnetic letter tiles into this activity.

Printable Letter Tiles

Using printable letter tiles is one of the easiest ways to work on word building with your kids. Your youngest kids will be able to create simple CVC words with these tiles.

You could also use magnet letters on the fridge or alphabet beads to practice word building in early childhood.

Read It, Build It, Write It

Your kinesthetic learners will appreciate this approach.

Read, Build, Write Printables – Here’s a simple hands-on activity that you can use over and over. They also have vocabulary cards to go with these mats.

Free Printable Read Build Write Mats – This printable word-building activity will engage your kids because they are physically building the words with letter tiles or magnetic letters in addition to writing the word.

Cut and Paste Word Building Activities

Free Reading CVC Cut and Paste Pack – Your kids will learn and practice 65 CVC words. This pack includes pages with just one vowel sound to focus on, then additional pages with multiple vowel sound options to help them distinguish the difference.

Free Phonics Cut and Paste Activity – Your children will get good practice with these word building exercises for 88 words. This pack includes review of consonant blends.

CVC Word Building Activities

Learning how to build CVC words is the foundation of early phonics. Here are some printables to help your little learners.

CVC Words Activities and Games for Kindergarten and First Grade – You’ll find dozens of colorful and cute printables and hands-on activities here! With these ideas, your kids can have multiple options for independent practice.

CVC Activities for Kindergarten – You’ll find lots of tips for teaching CVC words plus a bunch of helpful activities for word families.

Compound Words Activities

As your kids become more confident with building simple words, they will move on to longer words. Here’s a few activities you can use to teach them about compound words.

The 8 Best Compound Word Activities You Need to Try – You can use Duplo blocks, self-checking puzzles and sorting activities. Plus, you’ll find 5 more great ideas to use as a word building activity in your homeschool.

Simple Hands-On Activities to Teach Compound Words – Your tactile learners will love the idea of incorporating a sensory bin into learning about compound words. The Memory game will work too or using puzzles for excellent practice in forming compound words.

Missing Letters Word Building

Word building activities that use missing letters are also very effective. It helps to have lots of practice in finding the correct letters to form words.

Missing Letters Worksheets – You’ll find dozens of themed printables here to help your kids with word building by having them come up with the missing letters in individual words. This is an ideal resource for extra practice!

Missing Letters and Building Words – Using these missing letter printables will help your children to gain competence in phonics and spelling.

Final Thoughts on Word Building Activities

Fluent readers begin with children who have a solid phonics foundation. The best part is that you can have lots of fun with hands-on word activity practice. Your children’s reading skills will grow and many of these ideas can be used as independent word building activities. You can use a variety of phonemic awareness activities to build word skills, so get creative!