Working with Sight Words

     Back when I was tutoring a second grader for a semester, one of the things I chose to concentrate with the student was Fry Sight Words. I used several approaches, such as making flash cards and playing a matching game, or doing a Word Point strategy that I saw on the web. One time, I actually had the words on PowerPoint slides and had the student read the words to me. Well, I was recently looking through some of my old assignments and I discovered the PowerPoint. I thought it would be interesting if I placed those slides into Movie Maker and make a video out of the slides, because I believe it's still a useful tool for teaching students sight words. This was the finished product:

     Moreover, here's the video of the Word Point strategy that I saw on the web and incorporated into my lessons both during my tutoring sessions in 2010 and during my student teaching last fall. When I did this with second graders, I made it seem like a game (just being enthused and encouraging those in my group to participate and earn tickets), so that's one way I differed my instruction from the one shown by the teacher in the video.

     In addition, there were other ways I worked with sight words with my second graders during my fall 2011 student teaching. SMART Exchange has a fun activity where students can click on the "cookies" and it reveals the hidden sight word for students to pronounce. I made it into a game where if the students pronounce a number of the words correctly, and without having to decode it (sound it out), then they earn tickets, which they could use towards the treasure box. Here's an example of the SMART Board activity that is used with the SMART Notebook software:

 

     Another engaging SMART Board activity (found within the SMART Notebook software) that can help teach sight words (or any kind of spelling/vocabulary word) is the Anagram tool, which allows the teacher to write in the specific words and it makes scrambled balls in which students can rearrange to spell a word. Here's an example of the anagram activity for the word "There":

     Well, these were just some ideas that I wanted to share about teaching sight words to students. I'm sure I'll come up with more ideas for sight words in the future!

Favorite Book At The Moment

     I read A LOT of books! Typically, considering that I want to be an elementary teacher, and because it's a habit of majoring in elementary education and wanting to also write children's books, I tend to read a lot of children's books. I don't know what it's like for others who majored in the education field, but the way you could identify an elementary education major at my university was by seeing if they left the university library with an armful of children's books - all of our assignments typically required at least one children's book! As someone who also worked at my university's library, it was always amusing to check books out to education majors, because I knew that if they came to the desk with a lot of multicultural books for children, they pretty much were doing it for a particular class that required us to read and annotate at least 25 multicultural books for children! My university's library, for me, was the only place you wouldn't be judge leaving with The Little Engine That Could! For instance, after checking out loads of children's books at my public library, the following visits I checked out a chapter book only to also receive a comment, "Wow, I thought you forgot to read big books!." Nonetheless, because I want to teach elementary students and am Reading Endorsed, and because I eventually write children's books, I feel that it's important to read as many children's books as I can!

     My favorite children's book at the moment just so happens to be WONDER by R.J. Palacio. The book is a very new book, only just released this past February, and is the author's very first novel. It's a book filled with varied emotions, partly due to it being split into "parts" interchanging with several of the story's characters' viewpoints. While it's split into several character point of views and different age-ranges, it revolves around the character of August Pullman (Auggie) who was born with a genetic disease that leaves him with a facial abnormality. When the reader first opens the book and starts to read Auggie's perspective, you just want to hug him and love him just as much as the other character's do! Moreover, the message in the book really is important for today's students, as it deals with the concept of accepting others who may seem different, and to stand up against bullying. Due to the concepts of the book, it is a book appropriate for 3rd-6th grade. 

     It's a good book to have a 10-15 minute read aloud per day, as the chapters aren't long (the longest chapter, I think, wasn't over 5-6 pages). I'm not the only one who thought about this considering that I've discovered that a lot of teachers are using this book as a read aloud - one teacher, in fact, went as far as creating blog entries for his class! Even I imagined myself teaching 5th grade next year just to use this book as a read aloud. That's how wonderful WONDER really is for readers!