#wholelanguage Archives - Empowering Parents to Teach

With enough exposure, sight words become easily recognized to a new reader. This game gives a fun opportunity to increase a child’s experience with these words! Kids have to pay close attention to the words on their lists as they search to find hidden sight words.

Materials:

Sight word cards to hide (print out materials below or make your own on index cards)– For longevity, it’s best to print them on cardstock or laminate them. You can also print them on different color paper so the child can easily recognize them when searching.
List of words to find

You can make your own words to hide depending on what your child is learning or you can use the materials I created.

Click here for the free printable materials

How to play:

1. The adult hides all sixteen words. The younger the child is, the easier they should be to find.

How I hid them for my four year old:

He thought this was hilarious!

2. The child is given a list of ten words to find.

3. Have the child read all ten words, with adult help if necessary, so the child knows what s/he is looking for.

4. Once the child finds a hidden word, s/he must check the list to see if it is one of the words on the list. Remember, there are sixteen words hidden, but only ten on the list.

5. Once all ten words are found, s/he must show them to you and read the found words out loud to you. If all the words are the correct words on the list, s/he completed the game! If any of the found words are not on list, have your child continue searching until the correct words are found.

6. To make the game competitive, you can set a timer. Have your child find all ten words before time runs out. Set the time based on what is appropriate for your child’s age and ability.

7. Play again using another word list to find the hidden words!

How is this game helpful?

As mentioned before, sight words are learned when kids see the word enough times and it becomes easily recognized. The more words a child can read by sight, the more fluent they become as readers. In this activity, I chose words found on the Dolch sight word list that comprises commonly used words.

Often times when children try to identify a word by sight, they may just look at the first letter and guess. With this in mind, I made sure to include more than one word using the same initial letter. By doing, this the child has to look past the first letter (hopefully at the whole word) to figure out if they found the correct word on his or her list. This can give the parent or teacher feedback. If your child brings back the wrong, “b” word, ask him or her why s/he thought that the word was correct. After listening and understanding your child’s thought process, you can show your child how you know that the word is different. For example, if the word “big” was on the list and your child brought back the word, “blue” s/he may not be looking at the whole word. First, point out the good that your child did, s/he noticed that both words start with “b”. After acknowledging this, you can point out to your child that when you look at the second letter the word on the list (big) has an “i” next and the word your child found (blue) has an “l” next. This tells you that the two words are different. Give your child another chance to find the matching word. After this interaction with you, your child may be more likely to look at the letters in the word instead of just the beginning letter. The goal is for your child to transfer this skill to his or her reading experiences.

I also made this a hide and seek game because it encourages movement. Kids were not designed to sit still, so I like to find ways that allow kids to move around while engaged in meaningful learning experiences!

As always, follow your child’s lead and keep a positive attitude! As long as they are playing and having fun with these words, they are getting something out of the activity. It may not go as planned, but the opportunity to show your child that you can have fun playing with words is priceless

Do you have a beginning reader? When your little one recognizes enough sight words to read simple books, he or she may enjoy this activity. It helps young readers reinforce words they already know, practice new words, and understand the concept of a sentence.

My son is a beginning reader and he just started routinely reading out loud to me every night before bed. This routine was started by him mainly to put off going to bed, but I went with it. Now that he is motivated to read, I began this activity using sentences that he was capable of reading from his nightly books. Like any learning activity, I only do it if he enjoys it and is motivated. If he isn’t interested, I don’t push him. He actually asks to do things like this because he wants to ” do homework” just like his older brother! This activity is one that he enjoys.

Here’s what we did:

1. He found a book that he wanted to read. He could read some of the book independently and I helped him with the words he did not know. He picked I Like Crabgrass from an early reader set.

2. The next day, I picked out a sentence that he was able to read all on his own without my help. In this case the sentence read, “It did not like to be cut at all!”. I wrote the sentence on a sentence strip. Teaching Tip: I purposefully chose a sentence that he could easily read on his own so he would be successful in this activity. I can always increase the difficulty if need be, but at this early stage I want him to feel capable of reading.

3. I showed him the cover and asked him if he remembered the book. I opened the book and showed him the page with the sentence I chose. I pointed to it and asked him to read the sentence. He did this easily. Teaching Tip: By showing him the book and page where the sentence came from, I was reminding him of the context of the sentence.

4. I drew his attention to the sentence on the strip of paper. I told him that he was going to build the sentence that he just read. In the small cup was each word of the sentence. He took out one word at a time and matched it to the sentence.

I kept the book on the tray to remind of us of the sentence’s context.

5. After he was done, he read the sentence that he created to make sure it was correct. We also looked to see that each word matched visually.

6. After this, I took away the sentence on the strip and jumbled up the words on the tray. I spoke the sentence one word at a time and he searched for the word I said. I brought out the sentence strip at the end so that he could check his work. Teaching Tip: This is a little more difficult because the visual cue of the sentence on the strip was removed.

Checking his work.

7. After this, my little one wanted to dictate the sentence to me and see if I could make the sentence. He was now the teacher!

8. Lastly, you can have your child build the sentence once more, completely on his or her own. Jumble up the words once again, and have the child build the sentence without the sentence strip or the parent dictation. We did not do this step because my little seemed ready to be done. However, the fact that he was able to dictate the sentence to me earlier indicates to me that he probably would have been able to do this if asked.

9. Once he was done, I put the sentence into a chart that is designed to hold sentence strips. I hung this where he would easily see it on a regular basis. This allows him to read the sentence any time he wants to. As we read more books, I can pull more sentences for him to practice making and add them to his chart.

Why did I do the activity this way?

First of all, I structured the activity to have a lot of support in the beginning and gradually took away the support. If he had trouble on any step, I could stay on that level of support.
I took the sentence from a book he chose. I did not have to prod or offer incentives for him to read. He likes this book so he has a desire to learn how to read it.
It was a real sentence from a real book, which provided context for the words he was reading.
This sentence has a lot of commonly used words in it. So even though he was practicing one sentence from one book, the word recognition from this sentence can help him read many other stories.
I included the punctuation mark because I wanted to show the structure of a sentence as well.

We kept it short and sweet so the learning activity ended on a fun positive note! We can repeat this activity with different sentences from other books he reads and add them to our chart. The more words a child can read by sight, the better his or her reading fluency will become!

This post is linked to:

Sight Word Hide And Seek

Sentence Making

Our Favorite Games and Toys for Gifted Kids

Our Favorite Games and Toys for Gifted Kids