Winter CVC Activities That Make Beginning Reading Fun!

Inside: Ways to incorporate wintertime fun into CVC activities for PreK and kindergarten.

This time of year means snow, sleds, and hot cocoa — so why not use those ideas to add some winter fun into your CVC activities! When it comes to teaching CVC words, engagement is key.

6 CVC Activities to Try This Winter

Here are a few CVC activities that will surely be a hit this winter.

Work on Word Families

The Hot Cocoa CVC Activity in my store goes along with lots of winter themes and makes it fun for kids to work on word families.

It’s differentiated so that you can use it with students of varying levels.

UPDATE: There’s also now this digital version!

Having PreK and kindergarten learners see, hear, and speak these variations will help them practice and understand multiple CVC words.

Children who are new to CVC words can work on the cards that include whole words. Give them a few “cups” at a time from the same word family. Even better, provide a limited set of letters to encourage them to discover that the ending letters are the same on all the cards.

As kids advance, you can move to the cards with the initial sound missing ( _ a t), medial sound missing (c _ t ), both the medial and ending sound missing (c _ _ ), and only the medial sound given (_ a _ ).

Once you’ve introduced several word families, ask students to sort the cards into those families before they add the marshmallow “letters.”

Rhyming activities also help kids understand word families. For another winter CVC activity, you could try some of these snowflake rhyming activities, or read aloud books that rhyme.

Build words

The Hot Cocoa Winter CVC Activity is fun because the kids get to put “marshmallows” in each of their cocoa cups to build the CVC words! Not only is this adorable, but the kids also get to move and create using manipulatives.

Another simple CVC activity you can do is build words with building blocks. Get the old school wooden letter blocks and have your kids put together three-letter words.

  • To make it a winter activity, simply tell them to pretend they’re building with ice blocks. Let those little imaginations do the rest!
  • Focus on one vowel sound at a time and make it a competition! How many CVC words with the short “A” sound can they create?
  • Have them create both real and nonsense words, and talk about which is which.

I also really love all these snowball CVC activities – they are another playful way to get in some winter word work.

Spell aloud

Spelling CVC activities are also beneficial. Take your word list and have small groups spell their CVC words aloud. This may be challenging for some learners. You can make it extra fun by handing them laminated or toy letters for each word they can spell correctly.

Make it a “winter” activity by writing the letters you need on paper snowflakes, or download these snowflakes that I made for my newsletter subscribers. (You can grab your own copy by clicking the blue rectangular button with my logo on it, located at the very end of this post.)

You could even give your students some of the partial words from the Hot Cocoa Winter CVC Activity, or have students spell full words that you read aloud. Either way, spelling is a great part of CVC activities.

Slide into word practice

Building words with marshmallows may warm up preschoolers and kindergartners on a cold winter’s day, but they’ll also love to slide into CVC activities with these CVC Blending Sliders. I love using CVC activities like this one to help teach decoding.

Great for beginners, this CVC activity uses sleds as sliders where your kids can move the sled across as they put all the sounds together to form a word. Start with words that contain continuous sounds like /m/ and /f/, and then move on to words with stop sounds like /c/ and /b/.

I found another clever activity for sounding out words over on Heidi Songs. This one uses plastic cups to work on middle sounds. You could easily use white cups and pretend they’re igloos or ice houses for a fun winter activity. Heidi also shares a smart kinesthetic trick for teaching middle sounds during whole group time.

Practice writing words

After recognizing and reading CVC words, writing CVC words will extend your kids’ learning. Practice with recording sheets in with the Hot Cocoa Winter CVC activities. Your kids will have a chance to trace and write their CVC words for maximum winter practice!

You could also incorporate a sensory play element, and have them trace words in a writing tray. I especially love this one made with cocoa!

Or, add an extra challenge and have your children write a story using their CVC words. Incorporate a winter theme for extra cold weather fun!

CVC activities don’t have to be filling out worksheets and writing page after page of words. Winter-themed activities like Hot Cocoa Winter CVC activities and CVC Blending Sliders are great to use to build word recognition, understanding, and writing skills. Use these CVC activities at home or school to help your preK or kindergarten children learn and grow as readers and writers!

Here is where you can grab the snowflake CVC word activity:

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