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!