An experiment was developed under the assumption that learning about word families could help ease the introduction of short vowels to first grade students. The hypothesis was that teaching the word families would increase students' reading vocabulary, in contrast to the learning acquired by students taught only phonetic analysis. The control group was taught the regular phonetic reading while the experimental group's reading was augmented with instruction about 15 word families. A pretest of 100 words was administered to both samples and results were calculated. The posttest was given following five weeks of instruction. Gain scores were computed from the pretest to the posttest. The control group's mean gain of 32.88 was significantly higher than the experimental group's mean gain of 31.09. On the basis of these results, it was concluded that there was little, if any, support for daily instruction in word families. Appendices include the pre- posttest vocabulary test and test results, as well as a list of the word families taught and materials for an instructional game. (Author/HOD)