In this case study, the facilitator and the students work with the following rhyming word family.

fit
pit
sit
bit
spit

In this rhyming word family, the sight pattern -IT is matched to corresponding patterns in articulatory information, sound information, and handwriting information. The facilitator evokes the sound pattern by asking the students to think about words that end in the sound “-it”. He engages the students with the corresponding articulatory pattern by getting them to say words ending in “it” as they think of them. He presents the corresponding sight pattern, the pattern that one of the students, Stu, does not know, by writing the words in a column on the flip chart. In this example, the facilitator does not engage the students with the corresponding handwriting information.

Other, non-rhyming kinds of word families are possible. For example, Claudia, a staff person at Street Haven, often works with word families with corresponding articulatory, sound, sight and handwriting information for initial consonants, such as:

scratch
scrape
screech
scribble.

In the following case study, the facilitator constructs word families to work with words the begin the M/”m”, then with words that begin with MA/”ma”.