Last week my daughter finished learning all her pre-primer sight words! She has got them down and her reading is taking off! So today I thought I would share how I taught them to her and what worked for us.
Since she is my oldest, poor girl will always be my little guinea pig when it comes to homeschooling. We have tried many different resources, games, worksheets etc. but finally found what works best for her. Though I will try these again with my son, I know he might like to learn a different way. Beauty of homeschool: always molding to each individual child.
At the beginning of our school year my daughter (who was 4 1/2 years old) already knew all her letters and their sounds. She was curious about reading so I decided to start teaching her sight words. I didn’t want to rush anything so I just focused on 2-3 words a week. After trying a few things I decided on what worked best and we had a great routine:
Every Monday I would introduce her to 2-3 new words. I used the sight word flash cards in the Lets Play School Sight Word Pack. We would go over them a few times and then would start coloring her emergent reader for the week. (The order of words I chose each week are based off of these emergent readers.)
The Emergent Reader Sets from The Moffatt Girls are so perfect for my daughter because she LOVES to color. Each mini book has 6 pages so she would pick 3 to color and I would color the other 3. When we were done we put the book together and she would read it to me. We then continued to read the same book throughout the week. Each book builds off the previous so she is constantly reviewing and reading all the words she has already learned. These little books have created such a special time for us while coloring together and have given her ownership and confidence in her reading.
We also used Lets Play Schools Sight Words Activity Pack for some fun games. This pack is loaded with tons of activities for learning sight words! Playdough mats, tracing pages, word matching, clip cards, find the word pages, Bingo and much more. (Now that we have learned all the pre-primer sight words we are going through these activities/games again as a refresher.)
And to reinforce our sight words we started using Dash Into Learning. These books are SO cute! They are an early phonics program with beautiful stories crafted to build reading skills. There are 10 books in the first set and my daughter loves them. Set 2 releases in June!
This Read it, Build it, Write It set from Bitty Beginnings is great for more practice to reinforce sight word recognition. The set does come with sight word cards and all the letters to build the words, I just use the sight word cards I already have and some scrabble pieces.
At the end of the week on Friday, my daughter adds the words she has learned to her sight word caterpillar. For each link on the caterpillar she has to write the word and color it. This sight word caterpillar makes her so proud and gives her the drive to learn more to make him longer.
These simple activities have been very successful for my daughter and she is so excited to be able to read.
When I first began to homeschool I was so overwhelmed with the responsibility of teaching my kids how to read. However, there are so many resources out there to help, you just have to find what works best for you and your family. Knowing that I taught my daughter to read is the most rewarding feeling!
I hope some of these ideas will be helpful for you too!
3 Comments