-ot word family worksheets

The -ot family splits unevenly. Hot, pot, dot and cot are concrete nouns a child can point to or draw, which is what makes CVC tracing actually work as phonics practice. Not and got are different: not is one of the 40 Dolch pre-primer sight words, and got is the everyday past tense of get, so both are usually familiar from speech well before this sheet asks a child to sound them out letter by letter. In practice that means four of the six words are genuine decoding practice, and two are more of a spelling check on a word already known by sight — worth knowing before you hand the page over.

It also means -ot pairs more usefully with -op and -og than with -at or -an, since all three share the same short o sound and a similar run of everyday objects — pot, top, hop, dog, log. Working those three families back to back locks in the vowel faster than drilling six words from six unrelated families. One regional note: cot (a baby's bed) reads instantly to a child in the UK or Australia, but is less familiar to many American kids, who are more likely to know the word from a camping cot than a crib.