This series focuses on word families featuring short vowels and CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) spelling patterns to reinforce early decoding skills while emphasizing onset and rime. Each cover is bright and cheerful, featuring die-cut photographs of animals that highlight the corresponding word family. The stories are simple yet engaging, offering themes that prompt inferential questions. For example, “Dog Jog” is a delightful and humorous story with sentences like “The dog jogs with clogs in the bog.” There’s plenty to discuss, thanks to the illustrations, which provide opportunities for making inferences and connecting to prior knowledge. The vocabulary and story structure are sophisticated, enhancing the reading experience. Each book introduces a new word family, allowing children to expand their understanding progressively. The practice activities before and after the stories are valuable for previewing and extending phonics knowledge. The varied sentence structures and inclusion of dialogue and different types of punctuation help readers enhance their understanding of text features. VERDICT: A successful set for introducing word families.

The Word Families series offers kids silly stories that emphasize words with “the same spelling and sound patterns,” and the repetition of the books’ featured phoneme/grapheme within a variety of words will help beginning readers start to recognize the letter pairs. Each title opens with three pages that prepare kids for the ensuing reading expe­rience. “Try It!” uses a sample word from the word family-“cat” for example-and asks the reader to look at its letters, sound the letters out, and then say the word. “Practice It!” lists several other word­ family words, and “Words I Know” presents leveled, non-word-family words that the reader will encounter in the story. Stock photos are humorously collaged onto solid backgrounds and lend visual support to the text (typically one to two sentences per page). In -at as in Cat, kids witness a cat in a hat get into a spat with a rat and a bat. Easily the wackiest tide, -ig as in Pig presents pigs in wigs who like to dig and jig. A dog wearing clogs jogs in a bog in -og as in Dog. The long i sound is showcased in -y as in Fly, in which a shy fly dreams of being a spy. Each title concludes with a two-page spread reviewing the word-family terms as well as a picture glossary.