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CVC Words Tracing Worksheets — printable PDF page preview
Free PDF · A4 · 300 DPI

CVC Words Tracing Worksheets

19 printable pages. Eighteen rhyming word families, 72 three-letter words, one family per page so the pattern is impossible to miss.

Pages
19
Ages
4-6
Paper size
A4
Print
Black ink only
Download PDF

Free to print at home, at school, and in a classroom of thirty.

Eighteen rhyming families, four words each, one family per page

CVC means consonant, vowel, consonant: cat, pig, sun. They are the first words a child can read without being told what they say, because every letter makes its ordinary sound. This book puts one rhyming family on each page, so the pattern is visible before it is explained.

CVC worksheet for the -at family with cat, hat, bat and mat to trace
Page 2 – the -at family. Only the first letter changes.

The eighteen families

a: -at, -an, -ap, -ad, -ag. e: -en, -et, -ed. i: -in, -ig, -ip, -it. o: -op, -ot, -og. u: -ug, -un, -ut.

Four words in each, 72 words in all. The a families come first and get five pages, because short a is the vowel nearly every phonics scheme teaches first and the one children hear most clearly.

What is on each page

Four words. Each gets a model row — one grey word to copy, two dotted ones to trace — and an empty ruled row underneath. Nothing else, because the point of the page is the rhyme, and a page with pictures on it gets read from the pictures.

CVC worksheet for the -ip family with lip, zip, rip and tip to trace
Page 11 – the -ip family.

Read it before tracing it

Say the four words aloud, in order, before the pencil comes out. cat, hat, bat, mat. A child who hears that only the first sound changes has understood the whole idea of a word family, and the tracing afterwards is handwriting practice rather than a reading lesson.

What this book does not do

There are no pictures to match, no cut-and-paste, no sound boxes. It is a handwriting book that happens to use readable words. For the reading side, the words here line up with almost any synthetic phonics scheme, so it can sit alongside whatever a school is already using.

What comes next

Pre-K Sight Words covers the opposite half of early reading: the words that cannot be sounded out and have to be recognised whole.

Printing this one correctly

In your printer dialog set Scale to 100% or Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page shrinks the tracing letters and they stop matching the size a child's hand is learning.

Plain paper is fine for crayons and pencils. If your child uses felt pens, 100 gsm paper stops the ink bleeding to the next sheet.

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