Activities to Practice CVC Words
Students need a lot of practice working with CVC words. Having hands-on activities for them to work on will help students make connections to these letters and sounds. Once students have a strong base of letter identification and sounds, we move on to CVC words. As they gain confidence reading CVC words out of context, they can then focus on reading CVC words (and others) in sentences and texts. CVC words allow readers to start putting together multiple sounds, which is a significant skill with reading.

CVC Activities
Why Teach CVC words?
CVC words are the first step to understanding that sounds combine to make words. As children need lots of practice in reading CVC words to build fluency, we want to make sure that the CVC activities are fun, hands-on, and keep children engaged. With CVC words, they learn sounds that can be blended together to make words. Being short words, children can also be taught to identify the first, middle, and final sounds in CVC words and then how those sounds can be manipulated to produce new words by substituting one sound for another.
TEACHING and INTRODUCING CVC WORDS
You can introduce CVC words without having to actually show your students any words. Start by just breaking up words into their individual sounds when speaking out loud. You can use visual cues as well if you would like (sound boxes). This will get students to practice their decoding skills.
You can also do the reverse, and practice blending sounds by saying individual sounds out loud and have students blend them together to find the word.
CVC Word Activities
I am always looking for ways to make learning to read a fun, hands-on experience. So I thought it would be a great idea to gather up all of the CVC activities here and put them all in one place for you to quickly find them.
CVC Word Families
Teaching word families will help students pick up rhyming skills too. They will be able to hear the same sound in each word as they read the list. Students sort cards that go with each family. This activity is great for students who need a review or some practice with rhyming words.
CVC Missing Vowels
Students can use letter manipulatives or a dry erase marker to fill in the missing vowel. These are great for when you are working on identifying those vowel sounds in small groups
Read and Match
Looking for a way to get your students learning how to spell and read, these Read and Match cards are a great hands-on activity to introduce CVC words to your students. They just read and word and identify the matching picture. I also made a set of Boom Cards for these. Self-correcting digital task cards and the best!
Secret Code
For a bit of a twist and a challenge, I made these secret code task cards a few years ago. Students use the code to identify what letter each box represents and then they read the word they discovered. My first graders LOVED these type of activities.
CVC building mats
Students sound out the word and build the word on the mats with letters/tiles. This type of approach to word work gives students an opportunity to isolate the phonics skills they are learning and apply them in their spelling!
Magnetic letter tiles work perfectly with these mats. Once you laminate them another option for building the word is to use a dry erase marker.
Head over to my resource library to grab a set for FREE!
Boom Cards
Boom Cards are another great way to get students to practice spelling out CVC Words. I have a CVC word-building set that is great for working on beginning, middle, and ending sounds.
These CVC word games and activities are going to make teaching CVC words more interactive for your students and easier on you! From printable CVC activities to paperless CVC activities, you will find something you can use no matter what your teaching situation looks like.
I hope you were able to find a few new CVC word activities that are going to be super helpful to you and your students!
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