A new thing for us. Henry’s learning sight words! This has been such a treat to practice with him. I set up a simple ‘assignment’ [wow, am I the homework mom now?] to begin learning sight words.
Henry mastered his letters long ago, and recently also [apparently] mastered letter sounds [that’s all from preschool, we haven’t really worked on them much here besides the occasional ‘So what sound does W make?’, or whatever letter they’re working on at school]. So, I guess, the next step is sight words! And Henry is so excited, because he knows that this leads to reading, and he’s so incredibly excited to learn to read.
To practice his sight words and to first recognize them, I had Henry write them on a piece of paper while looking at the list.
His first list of sight words to learn:
He wrote them and asked what they were as he did them. Easy enough.
Using a ‘High Five’ magazine from Highlights, I opened it up to one of the stories. You could also print off a story, or make copies of a book [so you don’t write in a real book… you’ll see…]. High Five subscription was given to the boys as a Christmas gift this past year and they’re loving it [thanks Grandma!], it’s a great gift for the kids that already have everything…. just something for you to think about.
Back to my Sunday School days and sitting through church was a hard task… I often sat with my “god-family”. [Yes, we were entire god-families, my parent’s were their daughter’s godparents, and they were my god parents, hence, I had a god-sister too. Am I the only one?].
While sitting with them during church service, I remember my god-mother frequently setting up an activity for us to do during the sermon. She would write letters or words at the top of the bulletin with a circle around them, or a line through it, or underlining it. During the sermon, we were to go through the bulletin and circle, strike-through, or underline each of those words or letters.
It was simple, but kept us busy. And I found myself looking forward to doing it [I really liked busy work]. It obviously stuck with me through all these years, so it must have been something special to me.
With that in mind, I made a simple sight word activity like this for Henry to practice his new sight words.
After Henry wrote out each of the words, I had him circle them each with a different colored pencil.
Then we read through the story in the High Five magazine together. And finally, I set Henry off to circle his sight words with the correct color pencil that he chose.
Of course, he missed a couple. ‘a’ is a hard word to actually spot!
I’m proud of him and these beginning stages of reading is so much fun!
I got quite a few more sight word activities to share that we’ve been doing, so check back if your child is just getting into it too! Exciting times, right?
Henry is almost 5 years old.
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