When homeschooling our daughter, we always hope each book she reads will be a unique learning experience. We also hope that she can grow with the book, so we’ve set the tone with Dumphy the Clumsy Dinosaur. Dumphy is a character that is continually slipping, tripping, stumbling, or tumbling, and his bad luck flops stop when he gets non-slip socks. You see how that last sentence sounded so rhythmic; that is what you get in this children’s rhyming book. The predictable pattern of relatable words that rhyme is based on word families also called Phonograms. This book will help beginning readers learn a large number of words by grouping three similar word families:
ock family words: (ock) block, clock, rock, sock
op family words: (op): cop, hop, mop, top
ot family words: (ot): got, hot, not, rot
Word Family Fun
As an exercise to help our daughter learn with word families, we used word sliders (see below). It’s a great way to practice sight words. Our daughter loved learning with Word sliders because it was fun, and it kept her engaged. Her father is a poet, so she is always amused when it comes to words that rhyme. She has even had plenty of Fun, creating songs and poems once she started recognizing the similar rhythmic tones. It’s an excellent method to practice! I printed out the word slider from TeacherPayTeachers; there are great resources for learning development and reading.