I LOVE teaching sight words

As a mom and a teacher I know sight words are often difficult to teach, flash cards often don't work for most children. Educators know children need to see things many times to be able to remember it and need go see it even more to use it. Early childhood educators know play is a wonderful way to learn therefore my sight word routine

I started to rework my boring sight word routine when I read Mr. Greg from Kindergarten Smorgasbord's Sight Word 60 routine. The highlight is getting the children 60 exposures to the word each week. In a school day already packed, I was determined to find 15 mins a day for sight word practice. Therefore, 9am sight word time was born.

Monday: I introduce 2-3 new words. I typically choose one or two words the children are seeing often. In the beginning of the year, it's words typically seen in emergent readers. My second word is often a decodable one such as "can," "got," and "had."

I use the app BIG to display the word. We read the word, each child reads the word, we use our loud voices, soft voices, high voices, fast voices. Then we repeat sentences using the word. Finally children generate sentences using the wor.

Next, we use white boards or tiles to practice writing/making these words. Children also review tricky former sight words.

Tuesday: Typlically, we play a sight word game. My students love any excuse to slap a sight word, or  challenge each other on their sight word knowledge. This teacher loves games that get the kids moving and allows a variety of children to be winners. Our current favorites are Feed the Dragons part of my Dragons Love Tacos Unit and Valentine's Slap It. We also enjoy many variations of Kaboom and Around the World.

Wednesday: Typically I choose whiteboards, as I like to include sentence writing on Wednesdays, but if I choose tiles, I use a shared writing technique on my whiteboard after the children make the sight words. I start with this weeks sight words and then make/write old favorites (or rather ones we find difficult). I always have the sight words displayed in the classroom, but I ask the children to try first then check their work.

Thursday: Sight word stations. I set up various games and activities we have done whole group. I give the children a choice about which station they would like to participate in. This gives me time to sit down with children I know are struggling with certain sight words. I can also assess during this time.

Friday: we play beat the teacher. It is probably every classes favorite sight word game. If you do t know the rules it goes like this: both teacher and each child writes the sight word in the middle of their whiteboard. When the teacher says go, everyone writes the word once in each of the 4 corners. First one done wins points for their team, by April I'll have to really compete with the kiddos to win.

Well that's our week of sight words! How do you teach them?

Bring the Rainforest Home

Hello!

Well the season's have begun to change and at least for this week we are having warm spring weather in Virginia. Next week could be totally different but for now we are loving spending time on our outside porch.

Last year, I shared one of my favorite units to teach about: the rainforest. You can read my original blog here. This year we added an additional technology piece to our unit.

This years lessons were foiled slightly with a baby at home who kept getting sick. In just 6 weeks we had an ear infection and pink eye, stomach bug, and the flu- oh and a molar emerging. Just what all mommy's want right?

Just like last year, we researched a rainforest animal and drew it out. The children used their iPads and really focused on the details. This year the children spent so long drawing and painting their animals that we did not have time to do two animals.

Once we had finished our pictures, the children wrote facts that they had found interesting about the rainforest. Many of the children chose to write about the different layers of the rainforest. This is a huge part of our unit.

The last part and probably my most favorite part was turning our writing into a Chatterpix videos. If you haven't used Chatterpix before it allows the creator to turn a photo or picture into a talking video. During one lesson, I taught the children how to use the app or rather one of our classmates showed me how to do it and answered the other students questions. Ok, it wasn't that bad, but he did know how to do more things than I did on the app.

Next, the children took a picture of their painted animal, drew on the mouth using Chatterpix, and recorded their animals reading their rainforest facts. Next, I uploaded them to our class dropbox and then used a QR creator to make a QR code for each child's video. We hung the QR codes up with the children's writing so our parents can scan the code and see the video. Check out our final display.