I love teaching sight words to young children as they become very confident and amazed as they learn they can read!
There is a time after you have moved past focusing on concepts about print with your students we move onto sight words.
I love teaching them by playing games in small group instruction!
When I do this I try to focus on only 11 words until they have memorized the words and know them without thinking about it. This means some groups I will focus on one group of sight words for a week and others it may be for six weeks and then I will move onto the next set.
Dominoes has been a fun addition to our learning this year! I have been surprised at how much the children have loved playing this game.
For beginning readers, simply matching words that are the same and recognizing that other words are different is a great first step to help build their confidence in identifying words. As we play, at the beginning I support them in sounding out words and eventually ask them to sound out and/or read the words they are using and they do confidently!
What is fun is that eventually I can leave this out during our learning time and the children love to play it with each other!
If you click on the image you can see the set I use. It has five different games included.
I printed the different versions on different colored paper so that I can keep track of which pieces belong to each set and this helps me keep my games organized for small group instruction.
