Happy Saturday! It is gray, cold and drizzly here in Music City! A perfect day to sit inside the warm house! We’re actually planning for our New Year’s party so we’ve been out buying supplies!!
Today I want to share one of my (in my opinion) most effective strategies for teaching sight words (and addressing common core standards!) to my little monsters! It’s a simple, quick and effective strategy that we do every morning during our reading block. I think the simple strategy works because the monsters are exposed to the same 40 words every single day. That constant exposure helps them to recognize those words when reading.
The strategy is a simple PowerPoint. I put each word on a slide and we go through the words quickly. The monsters read the word when it pops up. I added sound effects to make it more fun for the monsters. Prior to starting the PowerPoint, the monsters tell me why we do sight words everyday (so we can be better readers and writers) and they tell me we see sight words (everywhere!) Early in the year we do the words in order and they repeat the words. I will read the word, then they read the word. As the year progresses (October/November) I keep the words mixed up and in a random order and I start to read fewer and fewer of the words. Every day. Every word. The monsters are reading the words. Eventually towards the end of the year we start using all 220 words and start preparing for first grade! If you want the PowerPoint, you can visit my freebies page! Just click on Freebies at the top of the page!
This strategy has worked very well and I credit it for my monsters being so fluent in sight words (and therefore, great readers!) And then, on Pinterest (oh Pinterest, how do we love thee…let me count the ways…!) I saw this pin from Heidi Songs and creative juices went to work.
