Sight Word Activity

For anyone that has been following along with my frustration at Seth's first year of school...a quick update and then an activity I've created that seems to work really well for Seth learning his sight words.

We've decided to keep him in Prep (kindergarten) for one more year, and I am really looking forward to it.  He is a very bright boy but he is currently at the bottom of his class and because we want him to learn things like leadership skills and to build confidence...being frustrated with his work isn't going to help that. So we told him that his dad and I thought that since he is such a good encourager and teacher (which he is) we thought it would be good for him to do prep again so he can help out the kids just coming into prep.  He thought this was a GREAT idea and is really looking forward to be able to do those things next year.

One of the areas we have had trouble with is sight words...he had 100 words to know by the end of the year (he couldn't recognize his alphabet at the start of the year...which made this very tricky) and he currently knows probably around 20.  But he loves to cut shapes out of paper and tape them together to create different creatures and so I came up with 'Sight Word Creatures'

I began by printing out one of his sight words in large block letters...I started with 'the' because it was one of his early sight words that he just couldn't seem to get.  I made sure to comment several times throughout the project about what word it was and asked him a few times as well so he was familiar with it.






Then I had him cut it out (good fine motor skill activity) and we discussed how he could cut each letter in one place to make different shapes.





Then it was up to him to put the shapes together how he wanted and tape them together and this is what he came up with.  He taped it with regular scotch tape and then I taped over it with masking tape so it would be easy to colour over.


Then we mounted it on a piece of paper and I had him write the word himself.  This all worked better than I had anticipated.  It took him a couple days to complete because he got distracted with some other things, but when I asked him to write the word on the piece of paper we mounted it on he was able to do it with no help from me, he was also able to recognize it in a book we were reading when I asked him.  Now I'm looking forward to replacing our wall of alphabet letters into our wall of 'Sight Word Creatures'.  And his sister couldn't help but assist in showing it off (you will probably also notice he had a haircut between when he started and when he finished!)