Sight Words Practice: Making Sight Words Fun!!

One of my all time favorite things about teaching kindergarten is the awesome growth you see all year long! I just love the confident little learners that my students are becoming. We work really hard in kindergarten, but we also have a lot of fun. Because I believe that having fun is the main ingredient behind building life-long learners! So what’s my secret behind teaching sight words? Making them fun, of course, so I developed these 8 engaging and entertaining sight word practice activities that you can use in your classroom to help teach those ever tricky sight words!

A great way to start your kindergartners off for sight words practice is with some color word practice. These are sight words that are seen often and your students will have some of them in their sight word bank already. These are fun activities that help your kiddos feel successful while they’re learning!

 We also LOVE the novelty of using dry-erase markers to practice writing our sight words, and we’re saving paper along the way! With these printables, not only are they practicing writing the word correctly, but they also have to use the word in a sentence and draw a picture to match. That means they have to actually know what word they are working on, not just mindless tracing 😉

 We are BIG fans of songs and chants in my classroom! During transitions or down times, we love singing our sight word chant. I hold up a sight word flashcard, or write a word up on the easel, and then we practice the word altogether. Whole body learning and total physical response all the way with this little ditty! {you can download this chant here!}

We also love using stamps to practice our sight words. This is great because your students have to use what they know about letter formation to find the correct letter stamp, and the reluctant writers love the stamps because it gives their fingers a little break from writing.

Sometimes we even make stamping booklets! We focus on one sight word per book to complete our little stories. My students love getting the chance to be the author and illustrator of their own stories as well!

One of my students most favorite way to practice sight word spelling is with play-doh! I seriously could have this center out allll year and they would never, ever tire of it! I totally get it though, who doesn’t love learning with play-doh!?

Sight word task cards are also fun little activities to set up in your writing center. Lots and lots of fun and engaging ways to practice those all important words!

Later on in the year, as our sight word knowledge grows, we are able to integrate our sight words into our learning. My students love to roll the sight word dice and use it in a sentence. We practice our writing conventions, remembering our uppercase letters and punctuation. Plus, notice that fabulous finger spacing 😉 {you can grab this recording sheet free here}

We also love to cut apart sentences and glue them in the correct order. We usually  make silly sentences before gluing the sentence down which results in endless laughter, but what my students don’t realize is that they are reading the words solely on sight and not relying on the context clues to get them through the sentence! #teachertricks