Fun way to teach sight words

48 Fun Sight Word Activities That Work

Teachers are always on the hunt for great sight word activities. Sight words are any words readers recognize automatically “by sight”—for fluent readers, that’s almost all words! High-frequency words, the most commonly occurring words in written English like those on the Dolch list, are often thought of as the most crucial sight words.

It’s a myth that blindly memorizing every letter in a sight word is the only way to learn it. The science of reading tells us that linking sounds and letters is the most effective way for kids’ brains to learn any word. Many common words are easy to tackle using beginning phonics skills (like “at,” “can,” “him,” etc.), so staying true to a strong phonics curriculum is one way to support kids’ sight word learning. Even irregularly spelled words have decodable parts, e.g., kids can use the sounds of “s” and “d” to help with “said,” even if the “ai” is unexpected. Experts often call these words “heart words” to call out for kids that they should learn the unexpected word parts “by heart. ” (If all this is unfamiliar to you, it can feel overwhelming, but you’ve got this! Check out teaching guru Jillian Starr’s explanation for more help.)

Check out these low-prep and engaging sight word activities for both teaching and practicing words.

1. Map it and drive it

This is a genius way to introduce words with appealing materials: Say the word, represent each sound with a LEGO brick, write letters for each sound, and “drive” to read it.

Source: @droppinknowledgewithheidi

2. Smush play dough for each sound

Set up a routine that works for any word. Play dough squishing for each sound is the ultimate multi-sensory component.

Source: @playdough3plato

3. Map words with a magnet wand

It is so super-satisfying to drag those magnetic dots around! Watch the video below for lots of tips on introducing a word using this process.

Source: @warriorsforliteracy

4.

Make a mini book

Lots of handy info in one place for your little learners.

Source: @hughesheartforfirst

5. Tap it, pop it, learn it!

Hardwire those words in kids’ brains with this comprehensive word intro routine. (You had us with the pop its!)

Source: @hellojenjones

6. Find and swat words

An oldie but such a goodie. Find a word in an array and WHACK! Swat it with a fly swatter!

Source: @kids_play_learn_laugh

7. Flip word pancakes

Serve up sight word pancakes while practicing spelling them aloud.

Source: @bee_happy_teaching

8. Wear heart word bracelets

Make kids feel like sight word VIPs.

Source: @teachingmoore

9. Search for sight word balls

Write sight words on ball pit balls with a chalk marker or dry-erase marker. Kids can race around hunting for balls to read and toss in a basket, or hunt through a big tub of balls for a certain word.

Source: @preschoolforyou

10.

Start a sight word band

Loud but oh-so-fun! Feel the rhythm while tapping and reading sight words stuck to homemade percussion instruments.

Source: @earlyyears_withmrsg

11. Drive on a sight word path

This is one of many fun ways to use magnetic tiles for learning! Kids love “knocking down” word tiles with a toy car as they read each one.

Source: @travisntyler

12. Use sticky notes to inspire sight word sentences

Have kids stick words on items that give them ideas for sentences. “My Mom said to wear a helmet!” = so good!

Source: @kinneypodlearning

13. Write words on a sensory bag

So easy: Fill a zip-top bag with a small amount of kid-safe paint, seal well, and have kids practice “writing” sight words with their finger or a cotton swab.

Source: @makeitmultisensory

14. Wear a sight word crown

Wear your word proudly and practice reading others’ words. Fun in person or virtually.

Source: @mrsjonescreationstation

15. Play a magnetic-tile board game

We love new ideas for ways to use magnetic tiles for sight word activities. Easy to set up and fun to play.

Source: @twotolove_bairantwins

16. Spell words to a familiar tune

Get sight words stuck in everyone’s head, in a good way. We’d add a line for chanting the sounds in the word!

Source: @saysbre

17. Feed a word monster

Nom, nom, nom.

Source: @ecplayandlearn

18. Search for the pom-pom under sight word cups

Read all the words as you try to find the cup that hides the prize.

Source: @la.la.learning

19. Play sight word KABOOM

This classroom classic is perfect for sight words. If you need a refresher on the rules, Jillian Starr covers them.

Source: @essentiallykinder

20. Roll and write words

Roll, write, repeat.

Source: @mylittlepandamonium

21. Write words with rainbow colors

Bonus points for aromatic markers.

Source: @mylittlepandamonium

22. Trace words with flashlights

Stock up on batteries because kids never get tired of this!

Source: @giggleswithgerg

23. Find words in plastic eggs

Give kids a checklist of words to find as they open each egg.

Source: @blooming_tots1

24. Spy words around the classroom

Just add a magnifying glass and clipboard to make kids feel like supersleuths!

Source: @readingcorneronline

25. Find words in the morning message

Don’t forget about old standbys! This is one of our favorite ways to get kids to recognize sight words in connected text.

Source: @tales_of_a_kinder_classroom

26. Build words with bricks

Such a great use of extra building bricks!

Source: @raysinkinder

27. Write words in sand

Easy-peasy to set up and keep neat if you use plastic pencil boxes.

Source: @teacherhacks

28. Spell words on a construction site

Bulldozing over each word to read it is the best part!

Source: @planningplaytime

29.

Spell words with toy cars

Drive on over!

Source: @lozlovesprep

30. Park in a sight word “parking lot”

This one is easy to modify based on whatever toys are available in the classroom or at home.

Source: @msbendersclassroom

31. “Plant” words in play dough

Watch those reading skills grow!

Source: @planningplaytime

32. Build words in a sensory tub

Because spelling is just more fun when your hands are covered in beans!

Source: @coffeeandspitup

33. Write words on a magnetic drawing board

That eraser track makes for a perfect word card holder!

Source: @moffattgirls

34. Or write words on the window!

Everyone wants a turn to write on the window!

Source: @kindergarten_matters

35. Shhh! Discover words written in invisible ink

Write words in white crayon and reveal them with watercolors on top!

Source: @teachstarter

36.

Dot-paint words with a cotton swab

Calming and effective.

Source: @sightwordactivities

37. “Type” words on a keyboard

Busy day at the sight word office! Use a keyboard cover or any old keyboard.

Source: @lifebetweensummers

38. Read words before heading through the door

The line leader can double as the word pointer during transitions.

Source: @ms.rowekinder

39. Read the word the teacher’s wearing!

Wait, is there something on my shirt?

Source: @theprimarypartner

40. Take a sight word cakewalk

Choose a winning word when the music stops!

Source: @joyfulinkinder

41. Play sight word hopscotch

If you can’t get outdoors, tape on the floor works just as well.

Source: @wheretheliteracygrows

42. Play tic-tac-toe

I’ll be team “the.”

Source: @create_n_teach

43. Go sight word bowling

No bowling pins? Use half-filled plastic water bottles instead.

Source: @thecreativeteacher_

44. Ready, aim, read

Just throw a beanbag at a word target if foam darts are a no-go.

Source: @laurens_lil_learners

45. Play muffin tin ball toss

Toss and read. It’s easy to use colored muffin cups to prep different sets of words.

Source: @homeschooling_fun_with_lynda

46. DIY sentence flash cards

Authentic use of words in context for the win.

Source: @teachertipsandtales

47. Play sight word checkers

King me! If kids don’t have a partner available, they can “play” with a stuffed animal and get double practice.

Source: @sightwordactivities

48. Play sight word Guess Who?

Set up this game once and use it forever.

Source: @lessons_and_lattes

We’d love to hear—what are your favorite sight word activities? Share in the comments below.

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Plus, what are sight words?

40+ Fun Ways to Practice Sight Words

The challenge with teaching sight words is that children need so much repetition – and that can get boring. So having a big list of fun ways to practice sight words can help you keep your students engaged longer.

adorable pencil clipart credit: Creative Clips

If you teach kindergarten, then you probably already know that sight words are a big step in early literacy. Yes, phonics is critical too, but learning how to read some common words instantly really helps kids hit the ground running!

Of course, you want to make sure children are really ready to learn sight words so that no one gets frustrated.

These sight word practice ideas are sure to make work time feel more playful! Even better, many of these are multi-sensory activities – which we know actually help children learn better.

Write the Words in Fun Ways

Trace the word on a sand, kinetic sand, or salt tray.
Trace laminated sight word cards with finger paint or shaving cream (less mess than paint!).
Go outside and write words with sidewalk chalk
Or, stay inside and write the words on an easel or whiteboard. Dry erase markers make everything more interesting!
Write or trace the words with glitter markers, scented markers, etc.
Print off these cute worksheets and rainbow write the words!
Write the words on a Magna Doodle magnetic drawing board.

Build Sight Words with Hands-On Materials

Use playdough to build words.
Build words with letter tiles, blocks, or alphabet beads.
Use magnetic letters to spell out sight words.
“Write” out the words with letter stamps.
Create words out of dried macaroni and spaghetti, alphabet shaped pasta, or even letter shaped cookies.

Gross Motor Sight Word Practice Ideas

Active children learn well when they can move around. Plus, providing lots of opportunities for physical activity helps them stay engaged and interested in learning.

Here are some ideas that could work in a larger classroom or nearby hallway:

Set up a sight word scavenger hunt where kids have to find the words and read them aloud.

Make a sight word bean bag toss game: place words on the floor and try to toss a beanbag onto them. Read the words as part of playing.
Try having kids jump over to the words on the floor instead of tossing a beanbag onto them.
Play a matching game with 2 identical decks of word cards. Keep the first deck in a stack on one side of the classroom. Then, on the other side of the room, spread out all of the cards from the other deck. Students draw a card, read it, then walk across the room to find its match. Repeat until each sight word card has a match.
Play a balancing game where students walk across a long strip of masking tape on the floor. Place word cards along the line for children to stop and read. Encourage them to use their imaginations and pretend they’re walking across a log bridge, tightrope, etc.
Pretend to write the word in the air with their finger as a “pen. ”

Imaginative Play Sight Word Practice

When attention is lagging, some kids may respond to using imaginative play in their sight word practice!

Have dolls, stuffed animals, or action figures “search” for certain sight words. (Ages ago my kids practiced sight words with toy animals).
Similarly, you can have toy vehicles drive around to read and collect sight word flashcards.

Give the child puppets to read out words. It’s fun to ready your words in a silly voice!
Play police or fire dispatcher: say something like “there’s an emergency at the word have“! Then the child races to find that word card and pretend to help.
Involve the kids in inventing a simple sight word game with favorite themes or characters.

Musical Sight Words

A quick search on youtube will bring you lots of sight word songs. Jack Hartman’s high-energy interactive songs are super popular. If you want some sweet, calming sight word songs, then Molly Songs may be for you:

You can also just make up songs on the fly using familiar tunes and popular songs.

If you want your students to focus more on the sounds of each letter, and notice which words are irregular – a la Science of Reading – then you might like this newer playlist that I found from Nitty Gritty Phonics. There is more silly/engaging acting than singing, and the production value isn’t as high, but I think the educational value is fantastic.

Practice with Sight Word Apps

Practicing sight words with an app can be another easy way to keep kids interested in learning.

Some popular sight word apps include:

ABC Mouse (ad)
Reading Eggs
Learn Sight Words (ipad, iphone only)
Sight Words from RV App Studios

You can also practice with Boom Cards, which are wonderful because they can give teachers data about exactly which words students are struggling with.

Hands-On Sight Word Worksheets

Sight word worksheets don’t have to be boring. Many good ones incorporate interesting materials, such as dot markers, stamp markers, etc.

Here are a few from this site and in my store that you might like:

Easy Prep Sight Word Center Activities

You also can print off and prepare cute sight word puzzles, feed the sight word activities, and more.

Swat the Sight Word
Sight Word Fishing Game
Popsicle Stick Sight Word Puzzles
Feed the Cow Sight Word Activity

In conclusion, young children can practice sight words in so many ways! You really don’t need to bore them with flashcards and drills. They’ll learn by having fun!

Speed reading: 5 tricks for fast reading and memorization

Slow reading leads to the fact that a person is constantly distracted, gets tired quickly, and most importantly, does not keep up with the growing volume of digital information.

Meanwhile, from the seventh grade, that is, at about 13-14 years old, the brain is ready to master faster reading speeds. There are several techniques that will help develop the skill of speed reading.

Methods and methods of speed reading

Teaching speed reading will help the child quickly absorb information and learn better, in addition, he will spend much less time doing homework. There are various methods and ways of teaching speed reading, which include exercises, work with tables and texts. In this article, we will look at the basic techniques of speed reading.

Warm-up “2-3-5”

Any workout starts with a warm-up of the muscles, and when we pick up a book, we immediately start reading. To make your eyes less tired from printed texts and working at a computer, Pavel Palagin in his book “Speed Reading in Practice” recommends that you first “stretch your eyes” by expanding your peripheral vision.

Imagine that the focus of your eyes is like a spotlight beam and you can either widen it or narrow it. Pick up a stopwatch, an A5 book (this is a standard book size), relax and start driving your “beam” over several lines, first from left to right, and then from right to left.

Drive the first minute on two lines, the next minute on three lines, and the third minute on five lines. Try to clearly see all the words on top of each other, but do not try to understand their meaning yet.

At the last stage of the speed reading exercise, you should not “move the spotlight” along the lines, but read as quickly as possible with understanding one line at a time from left to right.

Wedge Tables

The reading process is based on images. For example, when reading the phrase “Masha ate porridge” sequentially, the image of a girl first appears in the head. Then we imagine that she is eating, and then that she is eating porridge. Another thing is when you see three words at the same time. The image of a girl who eats porridge immediately appears in my head. This happens instantly and greatly speeds up the reading process.

To see and perceive two or three words at a time, it is necessary to expand the field of vision. To do this, you can use special speed reading tables that will help develop skills.

Print out the wedge chart and focus on the center column first. Then slowly go down with your eyes down, while saying aloud the side numbers. The purpose of this table of numbers for speed reading is to reach the end and see the numbers both to the right and to the left of the central column at the same time.

"Labyrinth"

Another important component of the reading process is the ability to concentrate for a long time.

This sub-skill is trained with the help of mazes familiar from childhood, which will also help to master the fast way of reading.

Try to find a way out of this trap with just a glance.

Recurrent eye movements

While reading, we often return to the already read part of the text. This negatively affects comprehension and reduces speed.

In order not to reread the same thing, slide your finger or pencil under the line while reading. This speed reading technique looks “childish”, but it is very effective.

Technique for the development of speed reading "Harvesting"

This method is also described in the book by Pavel Palagin.

When you have read an interesting paragraph with useful information and moved on to the next one, it does not mean that the knowledge has passed from the book to you. Your brain remembers the following: “Useful information in the book. If you need to remember it, you will have to reread the book.

In order for information to become part of you and pass into long-term memory, you need to pause, present the essence of what you have read and say the main points to yourself.

Three steps of Harvesting speed reading technique:

Stop. As soon as you have read the completed semantic block to the end, stop the reading process, take your eyes off the text and take a short pause.
Essence. Present the basis of the read text in the form of an image, a diagram, a situation, and the like. The main aspects of the new information and the meaning that they carry should appear in your head.
Speaking the basics. Try to succinctly and briefly describe in your own words the essence of the text that you imagined. The shorter the better.

At the same time, during the reading itself, it is important to avoid articulation (pronunciation of the text). To do this, you can tightly compress your lips and bite your tongue. And even more “harvest” can be collected by armed with a text highlighter and marking important points in the text (no more than 10 words per thought).

Texts for speed reading

To develop speed reading, you can use special texts for speed reading. These texts are different from the usual ones and are great for developing a fast way of reading. For example, text can be rotated away from the reader by 90 degrees, written upside down, or it may be missing some letters that need to be guessed. Also, when teaching speed reading, “noisy” texts are used - various “lattices” or “cobwebs” are superimposed on such texts. Texts for speed reading can be found in training books for the development of speed reading in children.

An example of a "noisy" text for speed reading

Summary

Regular practice will help your child master the skill of speed reading and use it successfully in school. In the process of learning, you can refer to the methods that we described in the article, use methodological aids, including tables for speed reading, exercises and texts for speed reading. Praise your child for success and motivate him to learn speed reading to discover new possibilities.

How to learn to write interesting texts

Before moving on to techniques that make texts interesting, I note that you do not need to use them all at once. Sometimes it is enough if there is one capacious metaphor in the post and it is remembered.

Ring composition

In this case, the post begins and ends with the same element: an expression or an event. Fasting becomes somewhat of a refrain - and also a way to heighten emotion.

Hero arc

It's not interesting to read posts in which a positive hero did something good and everything ended well in the end. The hero arc is built from the opposition of the negative and the positive. Therefore, think about what will be the personification of the minus, what will be the personification of the plus.

Perhaps your hero will not only consist of positive qualities, or he will succeed right away. It is the alternation of descents and ascents that makes the text interesting, and the hero alive and closer to the reader.

Words with a strong emotional charge

There are words with zero emotional charge. We use them most often, and they do not cause us special emotions. And there are words with strong emotional content. And I'm not just talking about mat.

For example, compare:

sitting and waiting or whispering impatiently

a man entered or a healthy kid broke in

unpleasant person or familiar boor

I don't recommend using a lot of expressive expressions. They will not make the text interesting, and you - a brighter author. But sometimes such expressions look appropriate and become a kind of spice that sets the right tone.

Verbs

Verbs add momentum. They immediately take action. Like expressions with emotional coloring, verbs are different. You can say “walked”, or you can say “trudged”, “rushed”, “dragged”. And the impression from each of these words will be different.

So if you want to spice up your post, consider what verbs you can use to describe actions.

Maximum specificity

The more specific, the easier it is for people to apply information to themselves. But specificity does not mean dry facts. You don’t need to list the number of hours or blocks in your course in detail, leave it for the landing page.

When people buy a webinar, they're not buying an hour and a half of your talk. They buy their desire to learn more about a topic, get new tools, or change something in their lives. Focus on these changes, not duration and other details.

Means of expression

Means of expression or tropes are what we use to enhance expression: metaphors, metonymy, litotes.

At the same time, it is important to understand that without stamps and imposed assessments, the text will definitely be better, but the story is different with paths. All these remedies are like spices in food. Mulled wine with spices is great, but it will turn into a sugary mixture if there is a bucket of these spices. It's the same with posts or articles: find a set of tools you're comfortable with and use them sparingly.