Sight Word Practice

I have never done much sight work with My Little Reader. But now that he's a kindergartner, it seems more important. And the trick to get My Little Reader engaged with what he's learning is to make it a game. So we keep our sight word practice fun, low-key, and low-pressure. He's only five, and I'm trying to remember that forcing him down the reading road before he's ready will do more harm than good long term.

Sight Word Memory is the game we started with. We're focusing on just five sight words to begin with. I made my own cards for the game out of index cards. My Little Reader decided to underline the words on the cards, because he was getting confused about which direction they were supposed to go.


Once he was doing well with Sight Word Memory, we moved on to Sight Word Dash. I took our memory cards and put one of each word in a place in the house (I just spread them on the floor or table). I took MLR down the hall and told him a word to go find; he had to dash down the hall to the room they were in and come back with the correct word card. Then I repeated those steps till he had retrieved all the sight word cards. I would either give him a time limit on a timer or just time to see how fast he could complete the task (we played both ways). He loved this game, and wanted me to have a chance to play too. He set the game up for me just as I did for him, and he read me each word I had to go find and bring back. This variation of the game was great practice for him too since he had to read each word that I was to go find.

Then we played Sight Word Dig. I happened to have a bucket of dry beans (weird, I know). If you don't have dry beans handy, you can pick some up pretty cheap at the store. Or you could use rice, sand, or something similar. We wrote each word on a small piece of paper, and buried them in the sand. Then we took turns digging for the words in bucket of beans. MLR wanted to use the timer again. When it was MLR's turn to dig I would tell him each word to dig for. When it was my turn to dig, MLR would read me each word I needed to dig for off of the sight word cards.

As we continue our sight word practice, I'll share more fun ways we're practicing our sight words!