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Sight Words Level 3 - First Grade Reading Boost

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Today I'm sharing some simple sight word activities that you can prepare in minutes!

So what are sight words, anyway?

Some people will tell you that sight words are words that kids can't sound out; they just have to learn them by sight. Others tell you that sight words are the high frequency words: the words that kids encounter the most when they read.

I like This Reading Mama's definition: Sight words are words we want our kids to know automatically by sight because they occur so frequently in their reading and writing.

Sometimes we can sound those words out. Sometimes we can't. Either way, we need quick ways to teach sight words.

That's why I put together this list of easy-to-set-up sight word activities.

These are low prep sight word activities that you can put together in under 15 minutes!

Low prep sight word activities

1- It takes just 5 minutes to set up Sight Word Sticky Note Match. Just write the words on sticky notes and have your child cover the words on a dry erase board!

2 - Grab your alphabet stamps and some play dough for this simple sight word activity.

3 - Write the words on sticky notes. Then have your child write them in sand.

4 - Teach sight word songs. We are big fans of the collection of the sight word DVD's and CD's from Heidisongs. Listen to them as you're driving to school or during transitions in the classroom.

5 - Write the words on sticky notes. Then have your child swat each sight word with a fly swatter as you name it!

6 -with your sight words with This Reading Mama's free action cards.

7 - Write sight words in play dough with a stick or wooden skewer.

8 - Try chanting sight words in a variety of different ways - like a robot, a cheerleader, and more! You can get free sight word chants on TPT here.

9 - Make a sight word memory game. Just write each sight word on two different index cards. Then turn the cards over and invite your child to find the matches.

10 - Print these free sight word cards and build the words with letter tiles. When you join This Reading Mama's free email list, you'll get lots of free sight word cards! Learn more here.

11- Learning is always more fun with dice! Grab these free rainbow roll & write pages for a variety of sight words. Kids roll a die, check the key at the top of the page, and write the word in a particular color.

12 - This is such a creative way to practice writing sight words! Find the words with a magnifying glass and write them on the lines. Get the freebie here.

13 - Are you students learning beginning sight words? Print and play sight word blackout.

14 - Simply write your child's sight words on a piece of paper and have him stamp them with alphabet stamps.

15. Grab the play dough, a sheet protector, and a dry erase marker. Your child can build the word with play dough and write it on the lines below. Get the freebie here.

16 - Grab these free color-by-sight-word pages.

17 - Get some colorful craft sticks and write the words with a permanent marker for some simple sight word puzzles.

18- Sight Word Showdown is both simple and genius! Just grab a stack of index cards and write each word twice. Then follow the directions in this post.

19 - Write sight words in muffin tin liners and play a simple game of Three in a Row.

20 - Bury magnetic letters in a sensory material. Have children dig out the letters to build words.

21 - Make a sight word parking lot. Draw tiny parking spots on a piece of poster board, and write a sight word in each one. As you name the words, have your child park a toy car in each spot. Learn more here.

22- Practice writing sight words using a dry erase marker on a dry erase board.

23- Write sight words on craft sticks and provide some magnetic letters for this portable sight word activity.

24 - Where's the bear? Write the words on paper cups and hide a small bear or other tiny object. Your child guesses where the bear is hiding by naming the word on the cup.

25 - Go on a simple sight word hunt by matching the sticky note sight words to the words on a clip board. (This one's a favorite at our house.)

And there you have it! 25 low-prep ways to practice sight words!

YOU'LL LOVE OUR EDITABLE SIGHT WORD GAMES

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These sight word activities are so easy to prepare! You can use them for preschool, kindergarten, and first grade -and even older students! I can see how many of these would work for kids in special education, too. #sightwords #teachingreading

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An Introduction to Phonics and learning to read

Throughout this article, I aim to provide you with a clear understanding of teaching phonics effectively in the classroom and offer a variety of strategies and proven ideas to teach phonics.

WHAT IS PHONICS? A DEFINITION FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS.

Phonics can be defined as a body of knowledge and skills regarding how the alphabet works.

In the context of this article, phonics refers to the method of teaching a student to read by developing their phonemic awareness and an understanding of the links between these sounds and how we use the letters of the alphabet to represent them.

This understanding is essential not only to read well but to bridge the gap between reading and writing.

With a good foundation of phonics knowledge, students can quickly become confident readers and independent solid writers.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS IMPROVES READING FLUENCY

When students develop phonemic awareness, it dramatically enhances their reading fluency which is a reading "superpower", allowing students to read with speed, accuracy and expression. Reading fluency dramatically enhances students' ability to read with intonation and energy that translates into expressive writing skills.

A COMPLETE DIGITAL READING UNIT FOR STUDENTS

How To Teach Reading Using Phonics

The use of phonics, or synthetic phonics as this method is technically known, is an effective and efficient means of teaching young students how to read. For this reason, phonics is the primary methodology for teaching reading in the school systems of many English-speaking countries.

In English, there are around 44 sounds or phonemes. Given that there are only 26 letters used in the language and that many sounds have more than one possible spelling, it is helpful that students learn the relationships between the letters and sounds in a straightforward and explicit manner.

To achieve this, phonics centers on the relationship between sounds and how they can be spelled.

It focuses on the letter and sound correspondences to enable students to break written words down into their component sounds before later recombining them to read the whole word. This process is known as segmenting and blending.

SEGMENTING AND BLENDING

Rather than allowing students to struggle to recognize complete words, as in the whole word method, or to look for contextual clues to figure out what is being said in a text, phonics teaches students to look at the letters of a word and segment it into its component sounds, before blending these sounds back together to read the entire word.

For example, when faced with the word cat, a student might run their finger under the first letter and make the initial /k/ sound, then /a/, and, finally, /t/.

Once they have successfully segmented these individual sounds, they then blend them together to say the word /kat/.

With practice, the speed with which students can look at a word, segment the sounds, and then blend these sounds together to read the word rapidly increases. This makes learning to read through the phonics method the most efficient way for most children to learn not just to read but to write too.

DECODING AND ENCODING: THE BRIDGE BETWEEN READING AND WRITING

Initially, phonics reaps rich rewards for students in terms of the passive skill of reading. This is also known as decoding.

Later, the student's knowledge of phonics can help them develop the active skill of writing or encoding.

For this reason, teachers will often weave emergent writing skills, such as letter formation, into their phonics lessons to take advantage of the opportunity to bridge this gap between reading and writing skills.

WHAT ABOUT SIGHT WORDS?

As effective as synthetic phonics are in teaching students to read, they won't be enough on their own to unravel all the opaque mysteries of English orthography.

English is something of a mongrel language. Over the centuries, it has been influenced by the German, Latin, French, Greek, and Celtic languages, among others.

This fact has led to many inconsistencies in spelling surviving in the modern language. Sometimes phonics won't be enough to decode these words. That's why students need to learn to read some words by sight alone.

Sight words, or high-frequency words as they are also known, are those extremely common words used time and again in most texts. Many of them are phonetically irregular and follow no conventional spelling rules. For children's reading books, sight words can account for up to 75% of the words in the text.

Therefore, it's best to combine the study of phonics with the learning of these sight words for maximum effectiveness. This is something to consider when engaged in your long-term planning.

The most effective strategy for learning these sight words is for discussion another day; for the remainder of this article, we will focus exclusively on the teaching of phonics.

THE STAGES OF PHONICS TEACHING

Before beginning to teach phonics, it is helpful to have a broad overview of the various stages that comprise a comprehensive synthetic phonics program. The following outline can serve as a practical general guide.

1. THE PRE-PHONICS STAGE

Before beginning to learn phonics in earnest (e.g. sound/letter correspondences), certain prerequisite skills need to be developed, including:

LISTENING SKILLS:

Children must be able to listen carefully to the sounds of speech. They must learn to filter speech sounds from other unrelated environmental sounds. This is usually best achieved by playing various listening games. When children have developed good aural comprehension, the game Simon Says is a fun way to further develop listening skills.

SOUND REPRODUCTION SKILLS:

Once the children have learned to discriminate between various sounds, they should learn to reproduce these themselves. This is usually achieved by modelling the sounds carefully for the children and encouraging them to copy these with particular attention paid to the shape of the mouth when making each sound. The popular fun game Telephone is excellent for this.

SEQUENCING SKILLS:

It is essential for children learning to read to be able to sequence not only the events of a story but the individual sounds of the words they hear. They must be able to recognize which sound comes before or after another. They should also be familiar with sequencing language such as first, second, before, after, then etc.

We have a complete guide to sequencing for teachers and students here.

2. SOUNDS AND ACTIONS

With our younger kids, it can be challenging to give them an anchor to 'hold on to the sounds of language.

To help build such an anchor to these sounds, which will later help link sounds to written letters, actions are often connected to each sound to aid in memorizing them. This is especially useful in the early stages as it works well for the most basic of sounds.

For example, when making the /m/ sound, children could be taught to rub their tummies as if they have eaten something delicious while saying " mmmmm ".

Or, they could open their mouths wide as if they were eating an apple while saying the /a/ sound.

It is easy to devise customized actions to go along with the various sounds of English and then teach these to your class. Ensure you consistently use the same actions every time for a specific sound to avoid confusion.

Later, when students come to segment words into their individual sounds, they can use these actions to help recall them.

3. THE LETTER AND SOUNDS CORRESPONDENCES

Explicitly teaching the letter and sound correspondences lie at the heart of good phonics teaching.

It is essential to understand a little of the theory of synthetic phonics to be effective here. Here are a few important points to consider:

● Letter Names vs. Letter Sounds

It is crucial that children understand the difference between the names of the letters of the English alphabet and the sounds, as these are two very different things. For example, the letter c is called / see/ but the letter itself usually denotes either a /k/ or /s/ sound. It may seem obvious, but many teachers not trained in the teaching of phonics overlook this distinction and unwittingly make learning to read much more difficult for their students as a result.

● Letters Don't Make The Sounds

As the limited letters used in English are needed to represent many different sounds, it's important to point out to students that letters don't make the sounds; they are simply an option for showing the sound. Often there will be more than one way to show the same sound; for example, the sound /s/ can be encoded in several different ways, including as s, c, and ps. When you are asking your students to write something, you can make the sound and ask them what letter they could use to show this sound. This type of phrasing reinforces the correct relationship between the letters and sounds.

● Avoid The Lazy Vowels

It is also important to remember that when teaching the letters and sounds to avoid making the lazy vowel or schwa sound at the end of a sound. For example, when pronouncing the /k/ sound, make it crisp and short, rather than adding in an extra -uh sound at the end. This will make it much easier for the students to blend sounds together later.

HOW TO PLAN A PHONICS LESSON FOR YOUR CLASS

The detail and delivery of your phonics lessons will depend greatly on the specific situation of your students. However, some general points will be helpful to consider when planning a phonics lesson for your class.

● Keep Phonics Lessons Short and Sweet

To avoid getting bogged down and boring your kids, keep phonics lessons short. In and around 10 to 15 minutes is ideal and no more than 20 minutes. Remember, we want our kids to be lifelong readers, and that means they need to enjoy it!

● Be Consistent

There is a lot of ground to cover here, and consistency is key. If your students are learning to read, they'll need to practice and study their phonics every day - preferably at the same time each day too.

● Keep on Moving

While a lot of reinforcement will be required over the course of the year, research has shown that keeping a brisk pace through a phonics program achieves the best results. Don't get bogged down waiting for everyone to get everything before moving on. You will be revisiting the material.

● Keep Things Fun!

Learning to read should be a positive experience, particularly as learning to read means acquiring one of the most empowering skills a child will ever have. To keep things fun, be sure to incorporate lots of enjoyable activities and games into your phonics lessons.

TEACHING ACTIVITIES FOR ANY TEXT - GREAT FOR GUIDED READING

Phonics Games and Activities
I Spy
This perennial classic is a fun way to get some phonics practice in. You can adapt it to say, "I spy with my little eye something beginning with..." and say a sound rather than a letter. If you wish to work on letter recognition rather than sound, simply hold up the letter itself quietly.
Sorting Activities
Sorting activities are a great way for students to practice their phonics knowledge and can take on an almost infinite number of variations. For example, younger kids may enjoy sorting objects into two hula hoops on the floor, which are labelled with their initial consonant sounds, while older kids might work on consonant blends.
Bingo
Bingo is another very versatile game that can be used to practice sound and letter recognition. Simply decide what you want to work on and place those into suitably sized grids (9×9 works well). These could be initial consonants, vowel digraphs, or pictures of nouns. If you set up some blank grids on laminated sheets, you can save yourself a lot of prep time too. Simply write a broad selection of sounds you are working on onto the whiteboard. Students can select 9 of them to fill in their laminated grid. Now each student will have their own unique bingo card!
Partner Reading
Partner reading is a great way to practice listening skills, as well as reading. Organize students into pairs and provide them each with a copy of the same text. One partner reads the text while the other follows closely with their own copy. The listening partner helps the reader decode difficult words when they have trouble. After a time, partners switch roles. This usually works best when partners are of a similar ability. You can further differentiate here by choosing different texts to suit the abilities of each pair.
Shared Writing
Shared writing is an effective means of introducing independent writing activities. For beginning students, it may take the form of simply spelling a basic CVC word together. For example, to work on the spelling of the word cat, you could draw three cradles on the whiteboard and say each sound; in turn, challenge the students to come up and write the corresponding letter in the cradle until they have written the word - -.

As we can see, the teaching of phonics is a highly efficient and effective means of teaching our children to read and, ultimately, write. It works on training students to be able to hear the various sounds of English, identify these sounds, and link these sounds to the symbols we call letters.

While there are other methods of learning to read employed with emergent readers in the classroom, in two decades of teaching, I've never seen another methodology come anywhere close to phonics for overall effectiveness.

And, best of all, phonics can be a lot of fun to learn and teach too!

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO PHONICS

The content for this page has been written by Shane Mac Donnchaidh. A former principal of an international school and English university lecturer with 15 years of teaching and administration experience. Shane's latest Book, The Complete Guide to Nonfiction Writing, can be found here. Editing and support for this article have been provided by the literacyideas team.

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Teaching Phonics: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers

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A guide to teaching phonics to students including phonemic awareness, reading fluency, phonics sounds for reading and, phonics games and activities. Teach kids to read through a logical research based method.

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The 1st Grade Level 1 Reading Program features a review of all the short vowels, beginning and ending consonants. Your children will learn words with the S blends, consonant digraphs ch, sh, th, wh and ph. They will also learn the soft C and G sounds.

Printables & Powerpoint

These high quality pdf worksheets are pages from our phonics activity book for preschool. Worksheets are arranged by course progression. Some of the skills the children will learn include:

Videos

You do not need to be a professional teacher to present the skills for this level. Our highly focused phonics video tutorials will easily do the job. Some of the videos include the following:

Games

Kiz Phonics offers a variety of reading games for all kinds of learners. These activities often combine audio, visual and clicking to learn. Each activity is short and focused.

Listening

The listening section of our first grade level 1 phonics program is in sync with the worksheets of this level. Print a worksheet you want to use and choose the audio from the playlist.

Featuring Worksheets for First Grade Level 1

S blends crossword
Learning S blends activity puzzle

Featuring 1st Grade Phonics Games

Featuring 1st Grade Phonics Videos

Kiz Phonics iPad Apps

Preschool Reading - Ages 3-4

Learning to read starts here. From as low as 3 years, your child needs to build the following skills that will prepare him/her for reading. Print Awareness and Phonemic Awareness are the hallmarks of this level. We provide the following types of resources:

Kindergarten Reading 1 - Ages 4-6

The Kindergarten Level 1 Reading Program, is suitable for kids between the ages of 4 to 6. Children will learn short vowels a & e, beginning and ending consonant sounds. The will learn how to read words, sentences and 2 short stories.

Kindergarten Reading 2 - Ages 4-6

The Kindergarten Level 2 Reading Program, is suitable for kids between the ages of 4 to 6. Children will learn short vowels i, o & u, ending and beginning consonants & digraphs. The will learn how to read words, sentences and 2 short stories.

1st Grade Reading 1 - Ages 6-7

The 1 st Grade Level 1 Reading Program features a review of all the short vowels, beginning and ending consonants. Your children will learn words with the S blends, consonant digraphs ch, sh, th, wh and ph. They will also learn the soft C and G sounds.

1st Grade Reading 2 - Ages 6-7

The 1 st Grade Level 2 Phonics Program features the long a & i with the silent e. Kids will learn how the silent e changes the sounds of words. This level also includes vowel digraphs ai & ay, vowel digraphs ee & ea and final y as long e.

2nd Grade Reading 1 - Ages 7-8

The 2 nd Grade Level 1 Phonics Program features the long o & u with the silent e. This level also includes vowel digraphs like oa & ow, ui & ue and final y as long i. Special vowels like aw & ew will be also be learned.

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First Grade Reading Activities, Phonics Worksheets, Videos, Games, Listening

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First Grade Level 1 Reading Activities: You will find Phonics Worksheets, Videos, Games & Listening Materials for Teaching Children to Read through Phonics - Reviewing Short Vowels, Reviewing Beginning and Ending Consonants, S Blends, Consonant Digraphs ch, sh, ph, ck, wh, Soft C, Soft G

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Phonics Video

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Writing Made Easy | Phonics for Kids - Learn To Read | Alphablocks