Word Ladders

What are Word Ladders?

Word Ladders are a great word study activity, and are pretty easy to make! They can be used to help students understand that they can manipulate letters in words to change them into different words, teach rhyme, word families, spelling, and more. I definitely recommend doing this as a guided activity at first or else the students don't get the meaning behind doing them. 

Word ladders can be a great morning work activity, teamwork activity, or review activity at the end of the lesson. I originally got the idea from a professor last semester, except he made his for older students who had a better grasp on spelling. His also had directions on what to change the next word to, but his words in the word ladder wouldn't stay in the same word family either. Since my student was much younger, I chose the word family route.

Here are some pictures of what mine have looked like. 

Since my student was so young we did it as a partner activity and with a whiteboard, this is so we could erase and add letters to the words and see how the words changed throughout the process.

 

 

There are various ways you can tweak these to make them appropriate for your students. My student and I really enjoyed working on them together. You may use my work, but please give me credit!

Keep On, Teaching On,
Charity