Word Chains for Encoding Practice

Are you explicitly teaching phonics in the classroom? Need an easy, no-prep activity to practice phonics skills? Love word chains but don’t want to spend time planning them out each week? These 72 word chaining lists are the PERFECT phonics practice for your structured literacy classroom!

What is word chaining?

With a word chain, students start with a word. With each word, they must change a sound to create a new word. For example, a word chain could go like this: chap, chip, chin, shin, ship, hip, hit, hat, had, Chad.

Why word chaining?

Word chaining is a great activity to help promote orthographic mapping. Students must pay attention to every single phoneme (sound), as well as every letter combination (grapheme) that makes that sound. It’s a perfect addition to your classroom for reviewing spelling and practicing new phonics skills!

Included you will find:

•72 word chaining lists. Each list contains 10 words, where each word differs from the previous by 1 sound.

•4 templates to use with word chaining.

Make sure to check out the preview to see all the skills included!