Games for Learning Sight Words
February 22nd, 2008 by admin
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
This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 5:21 am and is filed under Games/Ativities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
