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.