In our classroom, sight words are important.  We work very hard on learning all 100 sight words required by our district.  I am a firm believer in the power of sight words for our readers and writers.  If you read the research, sight words are vital to our students as they learn to read and write.  And ignoring the research, I see it in our classroom every year.  The more sight words a student knows, the better the are at reading and writing.  The sight words help them build comprehension and give them confidence to decode unknown words.  So, we are always looking for ways to practice and assess sight words.  That’s where our Christmas sight words activity, Lighting Up Sight Words, was born!

Christmas Sight Words:  Assessment

We use our Christmas sight words activity as an assessment tool.  I print only the words that we have taught.  Each student is assessed 1 on 1.  I call them to my table and we go through the words.  If they read the word in 3 seconds, I put a red mark on that light.  If they don’t read the word, we leave it blank.

After we assess, the students take the pages and color the words they read.  I explain that they only color the lights with the red dots or red marks.  We have a quick discussion about what Christmas lights look like and what colors would be best to use.

After we finish coloring, we cut out the lights.  Students then glue their lights on strips of black construction paper.  This paper is the “cord” for the lights!

After the glue the lights on I staple all of their strips together into one string of sight words!  We then put our Lighting Up Sight Words in the hallway to display our sight words knowledge!

The Display

Now, let’s have a quick chat about this.  We get lots of questions about this display and how it might affect students.  So here’s how we approach this:

First, the names are on the back so no one knows who the lights belong to.  No students are identified.

Second, we spend a lot of time in our class talking about how we are all different and we all learn differently and THAT IS OK!   When we finish the one on one assessment, we chat about things we can do to learn more words and get more lights.  Not only are we assessing, but we’re also using this as opportunity to encourage our students and talk to them about what they can do and WHAT WE CAN DO AS TEACHERS to help them be more successful!

You can get our Light Up Sight Words activity below!  This includes 200 words from the Dolch and Fry list and IS EDITABLE so you can add your own words!

For more information on how we teach sight words, check out our Sight Word 60 routine!

For more information on the glue sponges being used, check out this post: