I’ve been trying to work with Love Bug on some pre-reading activities, and I’ve created some really fun activities with sight words.
I printed a list of Dolch sight words and focused on the 40 preschool words. (I haven’t done anything with any of the nouns at this point. 40 words is more than enough at this point!) A few of our games or activities used about 10 words each so as not to overwhelm him with too much at once, though some use all 40 but easily could be broken up so that they’re not done all at once.
Here are three that we’ve done so far:
1. Sight Word Cookie Flip (found here):
I chose ten of the words and wrote them on gingerbread cookie cutouts. (Love Bug is really into gingerbread men, and I thought this would be easier to tell which is right-side-up than with round chocolate chip cookies.)
Then we played a game where I gave him a spatula and asked him to flip or pick up the cookie with a word I said. He liked the cookies, but it was a little difficult for him to flip them so it didn’t last too long.
2. Word Matching
I printed four sheets with ten words each and with the words repeated in a different order in a second column for a matching game.
Really simple to set up and a good way to work on matching skills!
3. Sight Word Balloons
I wrote ten more of the words on balloon cutouts. Then we taped them (he preferred that to glue so he didn’t get messy) onto a long sheet of paper, and he painted each with a different color of watercolor paint.
A few of the words here were the names of colors, so we painted them the proper color. We also set it up to have the “up” balloon higher than the “down” one. We had so much fun with this. The colors came out great, and he was being so sweet about things like for the last balloon having me close my eyes so he could surprise me with what color he was painting – he picked red because he knew it’s my favorite!
This one was a big success!
