Compound Words Teaching Resources

If you’re digging into compound words with your elementary students, dig into printables, worksheets, and more to bring the study of these fun words to life! This teaching resource collection was created by teachers to save your lesson planning time so you can spend more time doing what you love — actually teaching!

Haven’t taught this part of the ELA curriculum before or in a few years? Our teacher team has put together a quick refresher to get you started! Feel free to skip ahead to the resources if you have all this covered, and you’re just looking to save time on your lesson plans!

What Is a Compound Word?

A compound word merges two or more root words into a new and different word. There are three kinds of compound words:

Open compound words — These have a space between the words, such as school bus or living room.
Closed compound words — These have no spaces between them, such as classroom or homework.
Hyphenated compound words — These have — you guessed it — hyphens between the words, such as dry-erase or forty-four.

Compound Words for Kids

Compound words are a pretty simple concept to teach, but it’s all too common for teachers to skip over the types of compound words. Take it from our ELA teachers: Break down each type for your students!

Open, closed, and hyphenated compound words all have different features, and we’ve put together a collection to help you teach them all!

Take a walk through our compound word collection, and you’ll find a host of resources for teaching open and closed compound words, along with other types.

Compound Words for 2nd Grade and Up

Our collection is home to hundreds of compound word worksheets, open and closed compound word PDF files, instructional slides for compound words, and more. Here are a few of our favorites!