Categories Holidays, Literacy, S.T.E.A.M.

Spring Sight Words

In our classroom, sight words are important. We work very hard on learning all 100 kindergarten 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 they 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.Introducing our spring sight words activities! These two sight word projects work for spring and Easter!

Spring Sight Words: Assessment

We use our spring 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 leave the word. If they don’t read the word, we put a line through the word. After we assess, the students take the pages and color the words they read. I explain that they only color the petals or eggs with no lines.

After we finish coloring, we cut out the petals or eggs. For our Basket Of Sight Words, we glue the eggs in the basket. For our Flowering Sight Words, we glue the flowers onto a paper plate and then cut our a circle of paper for the center of the flower.

We then put our spring sight words in the hallway to display our sight word 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 spring sight word projects belong to. No students are identified.

Second, we spend a lot of time in our kindergarten class talking about how we are all different and we all learn differently and THAT IS OK! When we finish the one one-on-one assessment, we chat about things we can do to learn more words and get more eggs or petals. Not only are we assessing, but we’re also using this as an 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 Spring Sight Words activity below! This includes 200 words from the Dolch and Fry list and IS EDITABLE so you can add your own words!