Spring Flowers Word Building – FREE Printables
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These Spring Flowers Word Building printables are a free, engaging, multisensory activity to practice phoneme-grapheme mapping, word building, alphabetical order, and more!
🌸 Why We Love It
Like our winter word building activity, this helps students practice phoneme-grapheme mapping with 3 and 4 phoneme words.
The flowers contain all the letters of the alphabet, plus digraphs ch, sh, ck, th, and ph. There are also blank flowers so you can write in vowel teams, diphthongs, or simply use blank them as phoneme markers.
You can use this activity to practice letters and sounds, alphabetical order, phoneme counting, word building, games, and more!
Simply color in the flowers, cut them out, and begin growing your very own word garden when you place them on the flower pots!
👉 This resource was designed to be best suited for Kindergarten and First graders.
👉 Want more word building practice? Get our Elkonin Boxes/Sound Boxes for 3, 4, and 5 phoneme words and learn how they help students with important reading skills!
Ways to Use It
Letters and Sounds
This activity can be used for new letters as you’re introducing them, or for letters and sounds your child continues to struggle with.
Only provide a few flowers with those individual letters, 5-7 letters at a maximum.
👉 To work on letter recognition, call out the letter that you want the student to find.
👉 To work on sounds, call out the sound. Say, “Find the letter that says /m/.”
Once they find the letter, they can place it on a flower pot. Children can then begin blending the sounds together to read the word.
Word Building
Use any of our comprehensive words lists like our CVC word list, Silent E word list or first High Frequency Words list and dictate words to your students.
- Ask your child to make a word like “cat.” Place the “c – a – t” flowers on the stems.
- Have the child touch each flower while saying the sounds /c/ /a/ /t/.
- The child should run his finger along the flower pots and blend the sounds together to read the word “cat.”
You can also use this to reinforce spelling rules like C vs. K. If you dictate words that follow the spelling generalization (like kit or cap), students will need to practice using the rules to correctly spell the word.
Writing
Say a letter or sound, and have the children write the letter on a blank flower, then place it on the stem.
Play the “When Will it Topple?” game. Have students continue placing letters one on top of the other.
If they get a letter wrong, then the whole thing topples. Keep track of the high score and see how many flowers they can place in a pile!
Count Syllables or Phonemes
Place 3-4 blank flowers under the flower pots. If you’re working on syllables, then say a word and have the child place one flower for each syllable in the word.
If you need a list of words to call out, use our Counting Syllables worksheet.
If you’re working on counting phonemes (the sounds in words), then call out a word and have the child place one flower for each phoneme they hear in the word.
👉 Remember, digraphs are one phoneme (For example: /sh/ makes one sound).
👉 Consonant blends (like br, cl, and tw) will be pushed up using different flowers, since each consonant in the blend is clearly heard.
Alphabetical Order
Mix up the flowers. On a large table or desk, have students spread out the flowers and try to race to place them in alphabetical order!
👉 Use a timer or stopwatch to challenge kids to beat the clock and beat their previous time. You can use this just like you would an alphabet arc.
👉 Engage all the senses with this activity and have them sing the ABC’s as they place them in order! This will surely increase their time as well and help solidify those tricky letters that sometimes get muddled up together (l, m, n, o, p).
More Learning Resources
Download & Print
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