Credit: huntsville-isd.org 1
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
As can be said for most areas of English for little learners, some children have absolutely no problem when it comes to picking up reading skills, while some kids really struggle to get going, and we can understand why!
While some words in a book can be sounded out by children, as we all know, English is full of exceptions, and sight words are one of them. These are all the words in a text that cannot be sounded out, and must simply be learnt, for your child to understand at least half of the words in a text, which can be tricky if your child, like most others, doesn’t want to sit and learn words off by heart.
Here are some of our best tips and tricks for building your child’s awareness of sight words, and most importantly, making your child’s learning journey fun!
1. Sight Word Bingo
Fortunately for us, the internet is stuffed full of sight word bingo games, so all you have to do is type it into Google, and you’ll be met with thousands of options! Bingo is always a great game to play, especially as children can be so competitive and love to win. My advice would be to start simple with Sight Word Bingo, using the same Bingo cards for as long as necessary, to ensure your child has grasped the words on the card before you move on to harder sight words.
2. Paper Plate Game!
You’re probably all thinking, ‘how on earth am I going to incorporate paper plates into a game?’, but rest assured it works! Grab four paper plates and write a different sight word on each one. For example, you might choose: ‘said’, ‘the’, ‘two’, ‘have’. Next, line them up on the floor in a horizontal line and find a ball (small if you’re inside!). Take it in turns to shout out one of the sight words, and try and roll your ball onto that word. If you hit the paper plate, the paper plate can move further away towards a goal, if you miss, it stays where it is. The idea is to keep shouting the sight words, rolling the ball onto the paper plates, and eventually one paper plate will reach the goal and be the ‘winner’!
3. Sight Word Running Game
Again, take three or four sight words on cards, and place them around a room which is fairly easy to move around. For each sight word, choose a different action, so for example if you had ‘three’, ‘of’ and ‘my’, you might choose to hop to ‘three’, walk backwards to ‘of’ or wiggle to ‘my’. You must shout out a word, and your child must do the action over to the correct word. This is great fun, as you can make it into a race or move the cards around – it’s up to you!
Although you may think that practising these sight words once a week is fine, the truth is that children tend to forget things easily, so the more you do it at home, the better. The most important thing you can do as a parent, is to help support your child and not let them give up, so try these tricks to help them along the way.
