Sight word games for 1st grade

1st Grade Sight Word Games Your Child Will Love!

My Little Poppies LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links from Amazon or other programs are used on this website. For more information, please refer to our disclosure statement.

One of the best ways you can help your child learn to read sight words is through engaging and fun educational games. I have pulled together this list of my absolute favorites for 1st grade sight word games your child will love!

Table of Contents

A List Of First Grade Sight Words

Although I rarely use grade level in our learning,  as a reference, I thought it would be good to take a look at an official list of sight words for first grade.

Why Children Struggle To Learn Sight Words

Many children struggle when presented with a sight word as part of their reading practice. This is because sight words rely solely on familiarity and memorization for the child to be able to identify and read it. 

The younger your child is, the less exposure they’ve had to these words, and the less likely they are to be able to immediately recall them. 

Even if your child is well beyond the first grade, these words can cause difficulties for many readers, and may require an out-of-box approach to learning them. 

The Power Of Adding Play To Learning To Read

If you’ve been following our site for any length of time, you’re already know that we are game obsessed.

Children are doing so much more than simply having fun when they are engaged in play. Playing games works on a host of skills, including:

• Verbal communication
• Self-regulation
• Turn-taking
• Sharing
• Listening
• Cooperation
• Focus and attention
• Following directions
• Creativity
• Social skills
• Learning to handle wins and losses
• Cognitive skills such as counting, color/shape/pattern recognition, strategy, problem solving, early literacy, etc.

It has been said that play is the science of childhood.  There is something to be said for the hands-on, experiential learning that playing games together provides. Research has shown that student outcomes are much better in both understanding and retention when an element of play is added to the learning.

First Grade Sight Word Games: Multi-Sensory And Hands-On

These games are perfect for practicing sight words. All of them contain hands-on and multi-sensory learning that is ideal for this age group. 

Sight Words Splat

Sight Words Splat is a card game that helps kids practice quick recall of sight words. 

Zingo

Zingo from Think Fun is a personal favorite. It’s the Bingo of sight word games with a little extra multisensory action as kids “feed” the cards into the Zingo case. 

Matching Letter

Matching Letter helps with the basics of reading sight words, and also spelling them!

Dino Stomp

Dino Stomp is perfect for kids who love to move as they learn. Stomp on the sight words as you practice. 

Pop For Sight Words

Pop is an easy, grab and go game to help your first grader practice their sight words.

Sight Word SWAT

Sight Word SWAT is fun even for mom! Kids literally swat sight words as they practice with their very own “fly swatters”. This one is a favorite!

More First Grade Sight Word Games

I have curated an entire list that can help you see all that’s available for first grade sight word games. In addition to the above games, you may also want to consider:

• Slam Shifts!
• Rhyming Puzzles
• Sight Word Magnets
• BINGO cards for sight words

Looking For More Educational Games For Kindergarten and First Grade?

Playing educational (and non-educational) games with your first grader is something you’ll never forget!

Looking for  more gameschooling resources?

Never Board Learning is a private online community for creative parents and educators who embrace play-based learning and gameschooling. This is a wonderful way to add more educational games and interest-led learning to your homeschool routine.

Never Board Learning features a private community forum (not Facebook), guest speakers, live Q and As, day-in-the-life family spotlights, a private blog, and access to a growing printable resource library. 

Play can boost connection, fuel learning, and revolutionize your homeschool routine. We all know play is an essential part of child development, but how do you fit it in when you have a huge homeschool to-do list?

In this digital course, you’ll learn how to add more play to your homeschool day with gameschooling. Gameschooling is the intersection of play and homeschooling and it can change your entire homeschool atmosphere for the better! 

Join the fun today!

Visit the NBL and MLP Amazon Storefront for more gameschooling, homeschooling, and book recommendations!

Sight Words Games for 1st Graders Online

Children love to read. As babies, they love to flip pages and pretend to read a book. 

The challenges of reading only become real when children start learning sight words. Sight word reading can be a long and challenging process for most children. 

While some words stick to memory easily, others need consistent practice. 

At SplashLearn, we have some amazing sight word games for 1st graders to make reading more enjoyable for your children. 

While most of the words we read in our daily life can be spelled phonetically, certain words must be read by sight. Building sight word vocabulary and reading fluency will help your children read quicker and with more efficiency. 

There are sight words of varying difficulty. Familiarizing your child with grade-appropriate sight words will help them learn things faster. 

Sight word games make learning basic sight words and adding new words to your child’s vocabulary fun and exciting.

Learning sight words can sometimes be overwhelming. For children who are more comfortable learning through phonetic sounds, this process may prove challenging and, at times, difficult. 

Here are some of the best ways to make sight-reading for grade 1 easier and interactive:

• Online reading: There are several books that you can read online. These books flash the text on the screen and have a speech synthesis built into it. As the audio plays, the words on the page light up automatically. Children can familiarize themselves with sight words while enjoying reading their favorite books over and over.
• Word wall: You can now, quite literally, build walls with words. Make flashcards with sight words, one word on each card. Now, you may build this wall in several ways. You can ask your child to pick a card, read it, and lay the brick(card) on the wall. Use some regular masking tape, or just place the brick on the floor. Another way to play the game is to scatter all the bricks(cards) face open, call out a word, and get your child to pick the right one and place it on the wall. Remember that in the learning process, recognition comes before the recall.
• Word catch: This is a wonderful game for kinesthetic learners. Fill a tub with some plastic balls. Write a sight word on each. Get your child to pick a ball, read out the word, and throw it to you. Then you take your turn, throw another ball to your child, and ask him or her to read it.
• Tic Tac Toe: Once your child is quite familiar with sight words, introduce a new challenge. Make multiple tic tac toe grids and write down a sight word in each square. Play the game, as usual, ensuring the child reads the word in the square he or she wants to claim. You can read out your words too, and help make it an interactive experience.

By the time your child has reached grade 1 sight-reading, he or she should already be able to feel familiar with some 2-letter sight words.  

Always begin by practicing what is known. Then slowly introduce one or two new words a day. Try and follow these steps when learning:

• Show the word, spell it out, call the word out loud, and use it in a sentence.
• Now show the word again, and ask the child to repeat it.
• Spell the word, and call it out. Practice these steps a few times before you move on.
• Now show the child three or four words, and ask them to pick the sight word.
• Say the word out, and ask them to spell again.
• Practice reading a few simple, grade 1 sentences with the sight word in them. This will help them gain the context of the word.

First-grade readers are usually very excited about reading and spelling. They may feel a little disappointed when they experience struggles or challenges. Therefore, it is essential to remember a few things when taking your child through the process:

• Take things at their pace. Don’t rush because that won’t help the child or you.
• Avoid comparing with other children or the grade level. Some children may require a lot of practice initially and may pick up very quickly later on.
• Revise and practice. There is a lifetime of learning waiting to take place. Spend time ensuring the child has understood and is comfortable with the words before you move on.
• Motivate and celebrate – even the smallest wins and the effort.

Teach your child the joy of sight words through SplashLearn’s interactive online sight word games for 1st graders. They’ll make your child look forward to a new learning experience every day.

Try SplashLearn for Free

Games with children to develop attention and memory

Games and tasks for children together with parents

ATTENTION GAMES

"Forbidden word" . A game for the development of voluntary attention and resourcefulness. It does not require any material, since it is verbal. Its essence is as follows: the host asks questions, and the player answers. Answers may vary, but you cannot say one forbidden word that you agree on in advance, for example, the word " no". Warn the baby that you need to be extremely careful, as you will try to catch him. After that, you can start asking questions. For example, “Do you sleep in the bathroom?”, “Is the snow white?”, “Can you fly?”, etc. The child must find such a form of answers in order to fulfill the rules of the game, It is considered a mistake if a forbidden word is called or the question is not answered. As soon as the child makes a mistake, you change roles with him, he asks questions, you answer. The player who answers the most questions correctly wins this game.

"Forbidden traffic" . The kid repeats all the exercises after the mother, except for one "forbidden" one (jump or, for example, clap).

Scout . Start the game from the corridor. "The squirrel hid a nut in the forest, and now she can't find it. Help the squirrel." The kid is looking for a nut (any object hidden in the room) following the tracks left by a careless squirrel (a path made of a thread, an arrow drawn on paper, unusually placed objects). Gradually, the squirrel becomes more and more cautious, and the baby is more and more observant.

"Secret Letter" . Draw in the air the contours of a geometric figure, a number, a letter or even a word. Let the kid try to guess what you wrote with "transparent colors on transparent paper." The next secret message to write to the baby.

"Observer". Sit with your baby in front of a window. Find some fixed object and invite the child to guess what it is ("transparent, like a small house") you see. You can also play like this: "Quickly name 5 round (red, hard and smooth) objects in this room."

"Architect" You are an architect, a child is a builder. Both have the same number of cubes of different types. The architect shows with the help of his cubes what structure needs to be built (ladder, arch, house), the builder repeats the task.

"Magic word" "First, we should agree on what words are considered `magic`. `Magic` can be considered words starting with the letter `M` or any other letter (then the game will simultaneously develop the phonemic hearing of the child), or you can - denoting birds, domestic animals, etc. You tell a story or say any words in a row. When pronouncing the `magic words`, the child must give a signal: to hit the table with his palm (raise his hand up or stand up).

"Sherlock Holmes" Game for the development of observation. The player who is playing the role of Sherlock Holmes carefully examines the appearance of his partner and turns away or leaves the room. The partner changes some details of his appearance and invites the "detective" to guess what he changed. The subject of the game can be not only the appearance of the partner, but also the arrangement of objects in the room, small details in the picture, and much more. The complexity of the game depends on the number of variable elements. It is better to start with 3-4 changes and gradually increase them.

MEMORY DEVELOPMENT GAMES.

Even not very attentive parents notice that their preschool children have an amazing memory: they are able to memorize entire poems and passages without memorization, and often impress their parents' literary and artistic tastes by quoting a trendy television series or the text of a commercial. It would be nice if this amazing ability did not go to waste - after all, its flowering is limited in time! And although almost all children have a better memory than adults, there are still differences within a group of children: someone remembers the material better, and someone worse.

You can remember for a long time, all your life - in this case, they talk about long-term memory, which has a very large volume and is organized according to semantic connections. You can remember a few seconds - the time required for you to read one sentence; here we are dealing with short-term memory, which is often built on mechanical connections (associations), is small in volume and includes 7 plus or minus 2 elements. In order for information to pass from short-term memory to long-term memory, it must be repeated before memorization.

You can also talk about direct memory - when the material is remembered as if by itself, without special actions (they are called mnemonic techniques), and indirect, when a person comes up with something like "knots" for memory, in order to then remember difficult material. For example, our grandmothers memorized the sequence of cases in the Russian language using a funny poem, the first letters of each word of which resemble the names of cases:

Ivan gave birth to a girl, ordered to drag the diaper!

That's how many types of memory there are - and this is far from all that is known to psychologists and educators! But the most important thing for us is that a child's memory can be exercised and developed. Actors who memorize many pages do not have this skill from birth, but acquire it through exercise. For a child, memory is the main way of knowing and getting used to the world. He memorizes the language, and only then, meeting repeated sound combinations, learns to correlate them with the situation and thus comprehend the meanings of words.

He memorizes the rules, sentences, the multiplication table, in order to then understand their meaning, but for now he does not understand - to use it mechanically, trusting his memory. Characteristically, children have a better memory for emotions and images than for words and symbols. Therefore, it is great if in training you use illustrations, drawings of the child himself. It is also important to know that in different children either visual, or auditory, or motor memory may dominate, depending on this, it will be more effective either to show the children pictures, or to explain and dictate, or to ask the child to circle the letter or reproduce the image. However, 80% of all information a person still receives through sight and hearing, we will focus in the future on the development of these particular types of memory. Memory can hide, compensate for the lack of other abilities in a child, but it can also stimulate them, helping to expand horizons, creating a stereoscopic picture of the world and enriching behavior with new patterns. In this section, we put games and memory exercises necessary for successful schooling.

"Guess!"

Didactic game for the development of memory, attention and speech

You can play with a group or with one child. The task is that the child is asked from memory to expressively describe any of the objects in the room so that the partners guess. At the same time, you can not look at this object and name it. After the facilitator explained the rules of the game, and the children prepared for it and chose an object, the leader gives a pebble to any player as an invitation to the story. The person who received the pebble tells about the hidden object. When the riddle is solved, its author passes the pebble into the hands of the next player. The game continues until everyone has come up with their own riddle. The adult makes sure that the essential features are named, the other participants have the right to ask leading questions, but the leader must be given the opportunity to pronounce a fairly complete description of the subject.

"Grandma is packing in her suitcase…"

Mechanical Memory Game

You can play together with a child, but it is better - a company of 3-4-5 people. The adult begins the story: “Grandma puts a comb in her suitcase”, the next player must repeat what has already been said, adding the following item: “Grandma puts a comb and ... slippers in her suitcase”, etc. The game continues until the row is becomes so long that it can no longer be played. In children, this can be 18-20 items.

"Buttons"

Game for the development of memory and attention

There are two people in this game. In front of the players are two identical sets of buttons, inside of which not a single button is repeated. To begin with, it is enough to take only 3 buttons, but at the same time, the players have the entire set from which they are selected. Each player has a playing field divided into cells. The more difficult the game, the more cells the field should contain; 4 or 6 is enough to start. Buttons are placed on the cells of the field. The driver arranges them at his own request, gives the partner some time to remember their location (20-30 seconds) and covers the field with a sheet of paper. The second player must choose the same buttons from his set and reproduce their relative position on his field. Then the first player opens his field, and both check the correctness of the decision. Usually at the first stage, children cannot play correctly, they should be taught to help themselves by describing aloud the relative position of the buttons. At the same time, it is recommended to especially ensure that the child is correctly oriented and does not get confused in the directions "up", "down", "left", "right".

"Door hole"

Game for the development of visual memory and spatial thinking

For the game, you need to prepare a small bright and detailed picture and a sheet of paper, about four times the size of the picture. A hole is cut in the middle of this sheet in the form of a door hole. It is best to play in a group of 4-5 people. The host covers the picture with this sheet and puts it in front of the players. You can view the picture only through the hole, gradually moving the top sheet, but not lifting it. Everyone looks at it at the same time, but everyone drives the sheet for a minute. Then the facilitator suggests that someone tell what is shown in the picture, the rest correct and supplement it. At the end of the game, the picture opens, and the host announces the winner, who told the most correctly and in detail. He changes the leader.

5 verbal and linguistic games in the Russian language classes

A valuable method of stimulating interest in learning is the method of using various games and game forms of organizing cognitive activity in the classroom with students and schoolchildren.

The most budgetary game form is a language game, part of which are verbal (not acting) and verbal-role-playing games.

It is also expedient to single out linguistic educational games.

What's the difference?

Word game is a word game. The game takes place exclusively through the speech interaction of the players. The word game is aimed not only at the development of language flair, but also at the development of attention and memory.
Word-role-playing games is a kind of role-playing games with a complete absence of a material component: the game takes place exclusively through the verbal interaction of the players describing the actions of their characters, and the master describing the realities of the surrounding world and the reactions of master characters.
Linguistic game is a language game related to language learning and speech enrichment, with the development of logical thinking, communicative features of speech in terms of taking into account lexical, grammatical, orthoepic, syntactic features of speech.

Consequently, linguistic games are: orthoepic, lexical, grammatical, syntactic.

Linguistic game “Hidden Motives”

Surely, in the life of every person there was a situation when he committed some act and could not explain why he acted one way or another. Unraveling possible hidden motives is possible through a consistent analysis of previous events.

What we are working on: speech logic.

Rules: Divide the group into pairs (sometimes it's easier to unite not in pairs, but in threes). In each pair, one of the participants tells a situation that he cannot explain. The partner, through leading questions, tries to find out the facts, to connect them into syllogisms.

Syllogism is “a form of inference, reasoning, when a third, conclusion, is derived from two given premises or judgments.”
For example, all students take exams in the summer. I am a student, so I have exams in the summer.

In the second round, the interlocutors change places. Then comes reflection.

Word game “One day in the life”

The essence of the game: choose any profession with the students. Together you make up a story from some nouns (verbs, adjectives) about the working day of a professional.

For example, a story about a teacher's day: call-breakfast-lesson-question-answer-five-teachers-director-scandal-lesson-call-home-preparation-sleep.

Important condition: before naming a new noun, each player must repeat everything that was named before him. Then the story will be perceived as a holistic work. To better remember the named nouns, I advise you to carefully look at all the speakers, as if linking the word with a specific person.

Word game “New Vocabulary”

Usually we play in a circle with students as a warm-up at any lesson.

The essence of this game is to come up with new meanings for ordinary and all familiar words.

For example: boyfriend - lover of fish soup, monster - volcano, priestess - woman who loves to eat, etc.

The one who chooses more interesting words will win. The time allotted for preparation is agreed in advance.

Taboo word game

When I need to talk to listeners/students and students, or lead them to the topic of the lesson, or review previously learned material, I use the word game “TABU”.
The rules are simple: the student gets a card with the word written on it. It needs to be explained. And under this word, or next to it, there are several more that cannot be used in the explanation.
Other students must guess this word.

It is better to prepare cards on your own - for a specific topic (for example, an essay-reasoning - for students, or general scientific terminology - students / cadets).

Linguistic game “Sound Images”

The teacher reads/displays the words of the writer E. Zamyatin:
“Every sound of a human voice, every letter in itself evokes certain ideas in a person, creates sound images. I am far from assigning a strictly defined semantic or color meaning to each sound, but
Sound [r] clearly tells me something loud, bright, red, hot, fast.

[l] – about something pale, blue, cold, smooth, light.

Sound [n] - about something tender, about snow, sky, night:

The sounds [d] and [t] are about something stuffy, heavy, fog, darkness, musty.

Sound [m] - about sweet, soft, about mother, about the sea.

With [a] - latitude, distance, ocean, haze, range are associated.

C [o] - high, blue, bosom:

C [i] - close, low, squeezing.

Task: come up with words starting with the letters RLNDTMAOI. Ask students and pupils to voice their sound images.

Word game “Letters-Letters”

One student guesses a word to another, which he must explain to the others, but he can only use words starting with one letter, for example, “p” (any, except for the same root) . That is, the word “house” will have to be explained, for example, as follows: “built - I live”.

If it was not possible to guess right away, you can throw up additional associations: “building, premises, space, the simplest concept…” And at the end add, for example, “Pérignon” – by association with Dom Perignon champagne.

If the guessers are close to winning, then the teacher will need comments like “about”, “about”, “almost right” - or, in the opposite situation: “bad, wait!”. Usually, after the word is guessed, the explainer comes up with a new word and whispers it into the ear of the guesser - he becomes the next leader.

Word and language games are a great way to increase the effectiveness of your classroom activities. They can be used at various stages of the lesson: at the beginning - to create a favorable atmosphere and repeat the material that will be later used in speech, in the middle or end of the lesson - to relieve fatigue, at the end of the lesson, when there are a few minutes left before the call and there is no point start some more serious exercise.

Learn more

• 
  Emergent literacy writing and reading
• 
  Sentences with other
• 
  Letter sound associations
• 
  Cut out shapes for preschoolers
• 
  Verb list for kindergarten
• 
  R name letter
• 
  How to find the guided reading level of a book
• 
  Teach letter a
• 
  Fun words to learn
• 
  Fall gross motor activities for preschoolers
• 
  Basic shapes for toddlers