Sight Words – Part Five: Games!

We're winding up our series on sight words with some games to play in class or at home. 

Games can make for the best practice! Here are some fun ways to drill sight words in a playful way that will keep kids engaged. As a bonus, you can use sight word flashcards for many of them, making the set-up that games require less time consuming.

Tic Tac Toe
There are two variations of this game. Both begin with sight word flashcards face down in a pile. To play the simpler version, each player must draw a card and read it aloud before marking either an X or an O on the board. To make it more challenging, be sure each player has a pen in his own color. The first player will draw a sight word card and read it aloud to the other player. Instead of writing an X or O, the second player must spell the sight word in the square he chooses.

Fishing Game

There’s no competition here, but kids think this game is tremendously fun anyway. If you’re pressed for time, put a paperclip on each sight word flashcard. If you have time to really get into the theme, cut out simple paper fish and write a sight word on each, then slide a paperclip over each fish’s head. Put all the prepared words into a very large bowl or bucket. Now you need a fishing pole: tape a piece of string 18-24 inches long to a ruler and affix a magnet to the end. Give the pole to the child and show him how to dip the magnet into the “pond.” He should read the word on each fish he catches, then go back for more!


Memory 
This old favorite is great for practicing sight words. You’ll need two sets of flashcards with sight words written on them. Eight to ten pairs seems to be a good number—fewer than that is too easy, and more than that is overwhelming. Mix the cards up and turn them face down, arrange them into a rectangle, and take turns looking for matches. Make sure each player reads the words aloud as he turns the cards over. For extra practice, when the game ends each player should read their cards aloud while counting them to determine the winner.

Go Fish
You’ll need quite a few sight words for this game - at least twelve - but the good news is you can use the pairs of cards you made for Memory. Give each player three or four cards, which he should keep hidden. If you’re using flashcards, these will be unwieldy to fan out in one’s hand like playing cards, so cut a file folder in half and give a piece to each player. The folder can be propped up in front of the player so that he can spread his cards in front of him in secrecy. The rest of the cards go face down between the two players. The first player should ask the second if he has a particular word. If he does, he must give his card to the first player. If not, the first player must “go fish” by drawing from the pile in the middle. The game continues until someone runs out of cards, and at that point the one with the most matches wins.

Sight Words – Part Four: More (Fun) Practice

Struggling readers need lots and lots of exposures before they start to recognize sight words automatically. It’s important to make practice fun, though, because the more of it a child is willing to do, the more she’ll benefit. Here are some ideas I’ve used in private tutoring and classrooms:

Sensory Practice
Let your student go beyond just seeing and writing words and recruit her tactile systems by:

• giving her something with texture, like a sand tray, piece of carpet, or section of wall, and letting her trace words with her fingertip.
• tracing a word on her back and asking her to guess what it is. Start with short words (“it,” “am,” etc.) If this is really tricky, ask her to say each letter as you trace it before you move on to the next one.
• shaping the letters in the word with modeling clay rolled into ropes.
• skywriting the word (tracing huge letters in front of her so that she has to use her whole arm), or writing the words in large letters on a dry erase board (or on a window with a dry erase marker or fingerpaint), chalkboard, or on a wall or sidewalk with a wet sponge or sidewalk chalk.

Cut-Out Flashcards
This one will work better for some kids than others, but it’s worth a try. Print out the sight words you want to practice in large font, then cut around the outside of the word, hugging the border of each letter as closely as you can. Don’t cut the letters apart; you want to cut around the word as a single unit. Discard the word itself and keep just the silhouette. Glue this onto a dark piece of construction paper and use these cards for drills. This format helps some students appreciate the shape of words so that they recognize them as whole units more readily.

Letter Mix-Up
Give the student a handful of Scrabble tiles or magnetized letters that spell a sight word and let her unscramble them. If she’s new to this, tell her what the word is before she begins. If she’s an old pro in need of a challenge, simply hand her the letters and challenge her to figure it out.

A note about the next two strategies: You need to mark in books for these, so I suggest either making photocopies of the pages or investing in temporary highlighting tools. I really like these erasable highlighters, and you can also try this removable highlighting tape.

Sight Word Hunt
Open a book so that two pages with text on them are visible (or hand out photocopies of different pages) and race to see who can find the most sight words you’ve studied on their page. Students can mark the words on the text, or write a list.

Real-World Reading
Let kids who love stories help you read them. Ahead of time, go through a book you plan to read to the student and highlight or circle all the sight words you’ve practiced. Then read to the child, using your finger to track so she can see where you are in the sentence. When you come to a highlighted word, pause to let her say it for you.

Sight Words – Part Three: Daily Practice with Timed Drills

More on sight words by Beth Guadagni ...

OK, I know what you’re thinking: This doesn’t sound fun. Students hate being timed. The pressure makes them panic. Bear with me! I use this drill all the time with my severely dyslexic students. If anyone is going to have anxiety about reading, it’s them. And my kids like it! There are a few tricks I use to make sure this is a rewarding experience for them:

1) Choose the material to be drilled thoughtfully. If the student can’t read the list/phrases/text you’re drilling with at least 90% accuracy, it’s too hard. I try to pick texts they can read even more easily than that. Remember, we’re practicing fluency here, not decoding skills, and they can’t get faster with a list that’s simply too hard.

2) Make their progress visible to them. This is really the part that matters. I keep a piece of large-grid graph paper for each list/text the child is practicing. After each reading, we write the date at the bottom of a column and then the child colors in the number of squares that shows how many words he read correctly. In the end, we have a bar graph that shows day-to-day progress, so it’s easy for the child to see how much he’s improving (and since you’re using the same list over and over again, he will improve if you do this drill almost every day). Don’t be afraid to do two or even three repetitions in one sitting either—that’s where you’ll really see the numbers jump. Bonus: This is a great introduction to graphs!

I recommend doing this as a warm-up to each instructional session. If your student isn’t practicing sight words every day, this drill should be a daily exercise anyway because consistency is critical when it comes to fluency. It can take as little as one minute!

Procedure
Start with a Dolch list (see our previous post, if you missed it). Be sure to pick one the child can read with very good accuracy. I like to have a student read the list at a leisurely pace before introducing the timer to be sure the level is right. If even the lowest Dolch list is too hard, pick all the words he read correctly and just a few that he missed and make your own list by mixing these up. It’s okay to repeat the words several times on one list if you need to make the list longer without making it harder.

• If the Dolch list is too long, break it into two lists. 
• If you’re giving the child 30 seconds to read, you want somewhere around 20-30 words per list. 
• If you’re giving the child 60 seconds to read, you want somewhere between 40 and 60 words per list.
• Arm yourself with two copies of the list, plus a pencil, a piece of large-grid graph paper, and a stopwatch or timer.

Give one of the lists to the child and ask him to read it as quickly as he can for a set interval of time. I suggest 30 seconds for kindergartners and 45 seconds to one minute for older kids. Set the timer and let him loose! As he reads, use the other list to keep track of his errors. Any words he self-corrects should NOT be counted as errors, though note them for your own benefit because these are words that he needs to practice more. (Future posts will give you lots of suggestions about practicing.) When the timer goes off, congratulate him on a job well done! Now go over the list with him and show him the words he missed. I like to mark on the child’s list to help him the next time he reads. For example, my niece read “there” as “the” during one of our drills, so I underlined the last two letters to remind her to look at the whole word.

Next, do a little math. To calculate the number of words he got right, use this formula:

Total Words Read – Errors = Correct Words Read

Ask the child to help you count and do the subtraction if you want to make this a multidisciplinary exercise! Now, give him a marker and help him color in the graph to show how many words he read correctly. I like to do at least two trials per session because there’s always a huge bump after the first one that makes kids feel good, and I’ve even had students beg for a third try!

Leveling Up
Once your student is reading somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 sight words per minute correctly, it’s time to increase the challenge. Before you go to the next Dolch list, though, I suggest you introduce the lists of phrases, made from the grade-level Dolch words, which were included at the end of my previous post and use them for drills. Here’s why: the jump from lists of individual words to pages covered with sentences can be daunting for some kids, so reading with these short phrases is a good intermediary step. They provide practice with phrasing, too. I wrote these, but feel free to invent your own! Make sure, if you do, that you stick to words you know the child can decode easily.

As the phrases begin to become easier, you can introduce the next Dolch list; having two separate drills going at once is just fine.

I hope your young reader enjoys this as much as my students do!

Tune in next time for some fun ways to practice sight words.

Resources for Teachers: Sight Word Recognition Game

With this week's posts on The Yellin Center Blog, we welcome a new blogger to our Yellin Center team - Learning Specialist Renée Jordan, M.A. Ms. Jordan's blogs will include tools and techniques for teachers and parents that she developed as a classroom teacher, as well as reviews of apps, books, and other resources.

On a Roll

On a Roll is a game I developed as part of the language arts curriculum for my students in kindergarten and first grade. Sight words are a small group of words (approximately 300-500) that account for large portions of the common texts we read. For example, words such as: this, that, then, he, she, and etc are considered sight words. Due to their high frequency, it is critical that students cultivating early literacy skills develop their sight word recognition skills. 

Description of Game

On a Roll provides a fun, engaging way for students practice their sight word recognition. The game is fully customizable, thus allowing educators to alter the grid to include sight words that are specific to your students’ needs. Furthermore, peer collaboration is a great strategy for reinforcing learning. Therefore, having students work in pairs and use their peers as support when identifying sight words that challenge them will also be beneficial.

In my own classroom, I have used On a Roll as an independent, stand alone lesson, as an "early finisher" activity, and as one activity in my literacy centers. Furthermore, I found that my students really enjoyed and benefited from the activity and wanted to make permanent game boards for my classroom. As a result, I made multiple game boards with all the sight words I wanted my students to master by the end of the year and laminated them. My students were then able to use dry erase markers on the game boards, which were easily cleaned at the end of each lesson. 

Materials Needed

• One handout per every two students. You can download the handouts here (for page 1) and here (page 2), or create your own.
• 1 die per two students

Instructions

• Pair students with a partner and distribute materials.
• Explain the rules of the game and highlight the text at the bottom of the game board where the students can refer to the rules in case they forget.

Rules

• Each partner will take a turn rolling the die
• They will then find the sight word that corresponds with the number rolled
• Then the student will locate the sight word on the game board and color it in
• The first student to color in an entire row is the winner

Allow the students time to play the game. If time is left, have the students find a new partner and play again. Alternately, you could make multiple game boards with a variety of sight words your students need to master. Therefore, when they have completed a round of play they could attempt a new word list.

How this game aligns with Common Core Standards:

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.C: Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do,does).
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.B: Decode regularly spelled one-syllable words.