My Kindergarten students are expected to learn more than 80 sight words before leaving my classroom. With that many words to learn, there is a lot of practicing we need to do! Practicing our sight words the same way over and over gets boring very quickly, so I came up with some exciting games to engage my students while learning their sight words!
Incorporating physical movement with sight words makes them fun to learn! We used the Hopscotch Ring Game and some bright sentence strips to create a fast-moving game our whole class enjoyed! I wrote some of the sight words my students have struggled to learn the last few weeks on sentence strips. I placed them in the Hopscotch Rings with the hardest words at the far end, where I knew most of my students would toss the bean bag, and let my students each take their turn. There were several students who struggled to remember some of the sight words, so I introduced the "Ask a Friend" rule. If a student could not read the word, they were allowed to pick one other student to help them identify the word. This kept the game moving and allowed students to learn words they did not know.
During our small reading groups, we have also been working on sight word recognition. This time I wrote our sight words on some bull's-eye fans (without the fan handle attached). My students used the arrows from the Toy Bow & Arrow Sets to "shoot" the sight word that I called out to them. I taped the targets to the table to keep them from moving around. There was quite a bit of friendly competition to be the first to find the sight word. This activity will be put into our literacy games centers so that students can have more practice finding sight words. They will lay the targets out and then draw a card to determine which card they need to place their arrow on. This would also be a great activity to use at several times during the year! Students could locate upper or lower case letters, beginning, middle, or ending sounds in words, or even answers to addition and subtraction problems! Finally, as a way to increase the friendly competition among my students, we used the Bean Bag Toss Game as a fun way to see who had the best aim and which team had been practicing their sight words! I used a small piece of strong tape to tape one of our sight words above each hole in the Bean Bag Toss Game. Each team sent a member to try to score points. They picked one of the sight words, read it out loud, and had three chances to try to land their bean bag in the hole near their word to earn the points. Each of the teams had a great time cheering each other on and encouraging their friends to read and practice their sight words!
I hope these ideas inspired you to create your own unique ways to practice learning sight words in the classroom!