Do you want to expose your child to more sight words but don’t want to bore them (and you) with flashcards? Here’s a fun activity that adds fine motor skills and strategy as well! Label Jenga pieces with irregularly spelled sight words.
Unlike the early 90’s when I started teaching, we no longer want students to solely memorize these words by sight. Research has shown that many irregular sight words actually have ‘regular’ parts that can be sounded out, while there is often just one letter in the word that is not acting as we’d like it to. This ‘irregular’ part of the word is the part that your child needs to learn ‘by heart’. I like to draw a heart under that irregular (rogue) part of the word. Consider the word, "said". Both the s and the d sound as they should, but the 'ai' does not. So one heart is drawn under the 'ai' vowel team.
(If you look closely at the Jenga game in the video, you’ll see not one heart! That’s because I made this game years ago, prior to learning about heart words. I will add them soon!).
My students are learning sight words so much quicker now that we are mapping (dissecting, discussing and sounding out the parts of the word that follow our phonics rules) all words. They have less anxiety over these tricky little words now that they know that there is often only just a part of the word that is tough to sound out.
You can bump this activity up a notch by having your child try to write a sentence with all of the sight words on each Jenga piece. I wrote a word on each side so that means my students have four words to incorporate into a wacky sentence for each Jenga piece they pull. The sentences are odd and we definitely have lots of laughs.
I often ask my students to spell all four words without looking. They can write the words in the sky using big arm movements (incorporating gross motor here!), trace the words on the carpet or sandpaper (tactile input - adding another sense to make our lesson even more multisensory!) or have them write with markers on whiteboards.
Be as creative as you’d like to be!
Most importantly, make learning fun!
If you'd like to learn more about Heart Words or find a list of the most frequently used sight words and irregular sight words, The University of Florida offers fantastic resources. Check them out!
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