Using Word Ladders for Practicing Phonics Skills During Whole Group and Small Group Instruction

Research tells us that instruction is most impactful when phonemic awareness and phonics are done together. While previously it was suggested that phonemic awareness can be done in the dark, we now know how powerful it is to focus our phonemic awareness practice with letters. How do we do that? By giving students practice activities that focus on phoneme segmenting, blending, and manipulating while they’re working on reading and writing words. Word ladders are a great strategy for practicing applying learned phonics skills along with segmenting and changing sounds in words.

What are Word Ladders?

Word ladders are a word game first invented by Lewis Carroll in the 1800’s. Over time they’ve taken on different names, and slightly different looks. They’ve increased in popularity in classrooms over the last several decades, in my opinion, thanks to the work of Dr. Tim Rasinski. Dr. Rasinski promoted word ladders as a tool for building students’ fluency as they work with words.

A word ladder is a sequence of words that vary by changing the word from one to the next using clues. The clue may guide students to changing on or two letters or sounds in order to create the new word. In some versions, especially in Dr. Rasinski’s, the initial and final word have related meaning. His word ladders give students meaning based clues for changing words in addition to letter change clues.

What is the difference between Word Chains and Word Ladders

Word ladders and word chains are both similar activities in that small changes are made from one word to the next. In word chains, only one sound is changed from one word to the next, making them a phoneme manipulation activity. With word ladders, because clues are given to create new words, more than one sound can be changed. In some cases, the spelling of the word is rearranged.

Additionally, in word chains, students are given the next word orally and need to find the corresponding phoneme-grapheme change. But, in word ladders, the word isn’t given to students. Rather, students have to use the given clue to identify the next word and the phoneme-grapheme change. Word chains are a traditionally phonics focused activity whereas word ladders aren’t always focused only on specific phonics skills, but can reinforce learned phonics skills.

Why should you do word ladders?

Word ladders are great for building students’ decoding skills along with phonics, spelling, and vocabulary. When students add or change letters to make a new word, they have to focus on the phoneme-grapheme correspondences. This helps students learn and/or practice those letter-sound correspondences.

The structure of word ladders, changing one sound at a time, helps students explore minimal contrast words. Practicing and focusing on minimal contrast pairs is important for students that struggle with phonological processing. It can be difficult for some students to hear small variances between words. This is especially true with voiced and unvoiced pairs, liquids, and vowel sounds. This practice, focusing on the small differences between similar sounding words, supports students as they learn the words and corresponding sounds.

Because word ladders always have a meaning based component for each word, they also are a great way for working on refining students’ vocabulary as students connect the visual word with the image clue. When students then pronounce the word orally after building, they engage the tools they need to retain the word- the printed word, its pronunciation, and its meaning. These 3 components are important for orthographically mapping the word for its long-term retrieval.

Using Word Ladders for Phonics Practice

I have developed a series of printable word ladders specifically focused on phonics skills. Unlike other word ladders, each step in the series changing only one sound at a time. The only clues given are images, making students rely on their sound-spelling correspondences and the image to find a word with only one sound changed. This makes my word ladders similar to doing a word chain – but with students able to complete it independently since there is no orally given word. The phoneme-manipulation is a powerful tool for building students’ phonics skills.

While initially designed for students’ independent practice, my word ladders also can be done with you guiding them through. Because of that, I’ve included helpful Google Slides and Powerpoint Slideshows of each word ladder so you can walk students through the page step by step. The projectable version in Google Slides and Powerpoint is provided in full color for maximum student engagement. Each includes pre-built text boxes to make them as ready-to-go as possible. Due to limitations with Google Slides and placeholders, the text boxes do have a placeholder that needs deleted before writing the word. This can be cumbersome for students. While these are intended for teacher display and use, while students use the printed version, they absolutely could be assigned for students’ independent use. I would recommend adjusting the review set to not assign all 30 pages at one time.

In addition, I know everyone organizes their materials in slightly different ways. I wanted these word ladders to be as “grab-and-go” as possible, so I organized them in two different ways. They’re half page worksheets so you can choose to print with the same word ladder duplicated side by side on one page, or to have sequential pages side by side on one page.

CVC Word Ladders

My CVC Word Ladders include 50 word ladders organized by both short vowel sound and in a mixed review. Each of the short vowel sounds includes 4 different ladders. Each ladder alternates changing initial sounds and final sounds. The mixed review set includes 30 ladders with changes in any location in the word.

You can take a closer look at my CVC Word Ladders in my TpT shop by clicking the image below.

Looking for other ideas for building your students phonics skills? You might be interested in reading more in my 5 Decoding Activities to Practice Phonics Skills and 5 Encoding Ideas to Practice Phonics and Build Spelling Skills.