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 Dr. Fry’s 1000 Instant Words book is a fabulous resource for teaching sight words.  The words are listed in order of frequency, and mastery of even the first 300 will help improve reading dramatically, because even this short list accounts for around 60% of common text in everyday reading tasks.

Once you have the list (or any list of sight words, for that matter), you have a clear plan for what to teach your students.  All that is missing now is the method.  Choosing appropriate methods is just as important as selecting the content.  You need to match teaching vehicles to circumstances, age, personality, learning style, and other individualized needs.  In short, you need a strategy for teaching sight words.  The following strategies are grouped by learning style and are appropriate for a wide range of ages and settings to assist you with selection.

Visual Learning Style

• Flashcard games are suitable for all ages and stages.  Make two sets and you can play lots of games.  Be sure the words cannot be seen from the backs of the cards.  Try playing Memory, Old Maid, or Slap Jack games with the cards.  Nearly any game that involves matching will work.  Be sure to have your student read the cards at some point in the play.
• Make worksheets requiring the student to choose the correctly-spelled version of each word.  This activity is also excellent practice for proof-reading! 
• Spell words with letter cards, magnetic letters or letter dice.  If consonants and vowels are two different colors, your student may be able to recall the color patterns of each word.
• Word boxes, where the shape of the word is outlined, can help many students learn to distinguish similar words.  When you create word boxes, make tall boxes for the tall letters like l and k, short boxes for the short letters like e and v, and hanging boxes for hanging letters like g and p.
• Use a colored highlighter to mark troublesome words as you preview text.  You can even use a different color of mark for different words if there are only a few that are tripping the student up.
• Highlight target words in text from newspapers or magazines.

Auditory Learning Style

• Try putting tunes to the letters as you spell words out loud.  Some students can remember best if material is set to music.
• Read the words out loud in unison.  Your stronger, more confident reading will be a guide to the student and allow him or her to gain strength.
• Use Neurological Impress Method.
• Try spelling a word in rhythms to help distinguish one from another.  Instead of simply saying each letter in turn, try dragging some out and clipping some off so you get things like peeeee-you-teeeeeeeee for PUT.
• Some students can recall sequences of tones better than other sorts of sounds.  Try using a telephone keypad to dial the words and let your student listen to the tones.

Kinesthetic/Tactile Learning Style

• Arrange letter cards, tiles or dice to spell sight words.
• Use rubber stamps of letters to spell sight words.
• Try rainbow writing.  You’ll need lots of colors of fine line markers, colored pencils or crayons.  Write the sight word in large print, then trace several times, using a different color with each pass.
• Write the words on chalkboard or white board, the bigger the better!
• Scatter the letters of a word on the floor and have the student move from one to the next in order to spell the word.

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© 2006 Sandra Fleming

 Like most skills, practice makes perfect when it comes to mastering sight words.  Students build competency whenever they read, and drill activities are helpful, too.  However, most rote drill activities are not high on children’s lists of favorites.  They’d rather play, wouldn’t they?  If we can find ways to incorporate skills practice into their play, the kids are usually much more willing to participate.  Try some sight words games!

Card games lend themselves to adaptation into sight words games.  Many card games are based on matching or gathering items into groups.  To adapt a familiar card game, just choose the sight words you wish to stress.  Pick a card game you know well and pattern your new game after that one.  Make cards with matching words, letters to spell words, or words that are easily confused that you wish to emphasize. 

Now, play the game and follow the usual rules for scoring.  If you’re patterning your game after Old Maid, for example, deal out all cards evenly to the players.  Players take turns drawing a card from someone else’s hand and if it matches one in their hand, they lay the cards down.  If you are playing a Rummy-type game, deal five to seven cards out to each player.  Put the remaining cards face down in the center, and turn the top card up.  Each player can choose to take a card from the face down pile or the top card from the discard pile.  The turn ends when the player chooses a card from his or her hand to discard.  Points are scored when groups of matching cards are found and laid down.

Domino games also lend themselves well to sight words practice.  You can make sets of cardboard dominoes with pictures to match to the words, identical words to match, or other sight words concepts.  Play by passing seven to ten dominoes out to the players, and leave the rest in the Draw Pile.  Players must lay down a domino that matches one end or the other of the dominoes already in play.  Don’t forget to make some “doubles” so that more ends become available to make matches with.

These are just a few examples of ways to take familiar games and adapt them for sigh word practice.  Use your imagination, and you will be able to come up with a sight words  twist to nearly any game the children like. 

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© 2005 Sandy Fleming