How Our Sight Word Garden Has Grown!!

Happy New Year!! My winter break is officially over, and I have lots of fun posts lined up for you. I’m working on learning how to make printables, and hope to provide some fun materials from our current unit on mammals soon :)

I’m so proud to say that Ryan’s reading is really taking off (especially in the last couple of weeks)! We had  been pretty stagnant lately since he hasn’t wanted to work on his Explode the Code. In fact, I’ve had to be pretty sneaky about getting any ‘school work’ in. I tried to stay patient, not force him (remembering he’s only 4), and remember that his interest and growth comes in waves. Remember when he went from hating writing to loving it being completely obsessed with it in a matter of weeks?

Anyways, we are still working on our sight words. On We Teach,  a few bloggers were discussing our favorite posts from 2010. Our Sight Word Garden was my favorite because it was 100% my own idea and we still use it on a near daily basis.

When our garden started to grow so quickly, (and the sister and pets started picking flowers from our garden) we had to adapt it. I thought about putting floral foam in planter boxes on Ryan’s huge dresser. But, again we would outgrow it quickly. If you want to focus on a handful of words at a time the planter may be a good idea. 

So we transferred our flowers to three flower pots that rest on the shelf in our play kitchen (where we see them constantly). The pot on the left is for words that Ryan knows instantly. The middle pot is for words that he knows but needs to get a little quicker with. The pot on the right is for words that we are still working on. It’s been working great for us! Have you planted a sight word garden? If so, be sure to let us know. You could do vocabulary words or math fact gardens too! It’s fun to brighten up bleak winter days with beautiful flowers!

You can check out our other sight words activities from 2010, and you can bet 2011 will be full of more :)

I added this post to the ABC and 123 Show & Tell Blog Hop- check it out!

The Gem Jiggler

Do you habitually save things like egg cartons at your house? Sometimes my desk looks more like a recycling center than an office! But look- all that trash treasure comes in handy!

We have glass beads from the dollar store that we use for our behavior system (more on that later). Ryan still needs some work with double digit numbers. This game was super easy to make and provides another fun way to practice our numbers.

I started by cutting a single circle and asking him to trace it and cut it out 17 times. He did 4 in 30 minutes. It was great cutting practice- but I didn’t want to use all his patience on making the game! After the circles were cut I wrote the numbers and glued them to the egg carton.  TaDa done!

To play, stick a gem in the jiggler (aka the egg carton). Close it up and shake, shake, shake. The kids had a blast being super silly with their shakes. Open the jiggler and announce what number your gem is on. In yesterday’s version we announced the number, and then showed it on our abacus. If you could do both you got to keep the gem!

In the near future I’m going to use this game to introduce our place value kit.  With older kids you could have them write roman numerals or tally marks, or practice addition or subtraction. You could use sight words instead of numbers! You could use English or Spanish vocabulary. For younger kids you could include shapes or colors. Older kids could graph the colors they shake. The possibilities are endless…

Tissue Box Sentence Building

You know you're a homeschool mom when you can't part with a tissue box without making it a learning tool first!
Ryan enjoyed this simple sentence building game. I wrote each word of several sentences on separate index cards. I used different color markers  for each sentence. We took turns drawing cards out of the box and trying to make a sentence. I tried to make it so that you could rearrange the cards to make additional sentences (then they wouldn't all be the same color). This was a great way to practice the sight words we have been learning, more in context.

Sight Word Garden

This is our sight word garden! I bought cardboard flowers from Michael's and we painted them using our liquid watercolors . Each flower has a sight word on it and all of the flowers are put into a flower pot. When Ryan really knows a word (can quickly identify it, find it in stories, and spell it or sing it's song) he gets to plant it in the garden! So far Ryan is loving our garden, and I love that he's excited about learning these words and that we've come up with a cute way to make sure we keep practicing them.
During our morning calendar time (which I'll post about soon) we practice our flowers in the pot, count how many flowers we've planted and play games with the ones already planted. 
That's our summer reading chain hanging above the garden :)

Stamping Sight Words & Hidden Sight Words

Here are two more sight word activities that we did this week.

I made a simple template with each of our current focus word in its own box. You can download the template I made here. Ryan enjoyed stamping each word in the corresponding box.
(Yes- his tongue is always out when he's concentrating :)




Today during quiet time I wrote our focus words all over a piece of watercolor paper using a white crayon. Ryan was so surprised to find the hidden words when he started painting!

Our Week with Sight Words...

As I mentioned, we are doing lots of sight word activities! Here are a few we did this week:

We've been doing TONS with HeidiSongs!
Look for a full review of her products and a GIVEAWAY next week!

At the beginning of the week I put a list of sight words on the kitchen easel. They included: the, is, and, me, you, go, he, my, she, was. I had no idea how long it would take us to master these ten words, but I had to pick a starting point! Throughout the week we focused on these words. When we were in the kitchen I would ask Ryan to try to read the list; I most frequently presented it as 'Hey, do you know any of those words?' He took it more as a fun challenge than a rote task. When he mastered a word (which we measured by him being able to read it several different times in a day, find it in a book, and spell the word out loud) he got to circle it. For some reason, Ryan LOVED this process!

I made a set of cards by writing each word on 5 cards. We played a bunch of different games with our cards.

• Sight Word Slap-Deal the entire deck out to the players. Take turns flipping your cards onto a pile. Be sure to read the words as you flip them! If the word added to the pile matches the word already on top, it's a race to slap the pile. The first person to slap the pile takes the cards and adds them to the bottom of their own pile. The last player to still have cards remaining is the winner!
• Go Fish- Yup, just the classic game with sight words!
  
• Bean Bag Toss- We spread some of the cards on the floor, stood back and tried to toss a beanbag to land on the words!
• Hide & Seek- We took turns hiding cards around the house and finding them.
• Race to Find- Sitting in front of a bookshelf, we picked a card from the pile and then each grabbed a book and tried to be the first to find the word! Players kept the card for any race they won and we counted them at the end.
  

The goal of all of these games was to familiarize Ryan with the words and help him to recognize them. As we master these words,  I'll  add new words. As we tire of these games we'll move on to making these words on our own (spelling & writing)- in fun ways of course!

Scrambled Sight Words

We're starting to focus more on sight words, so get ready for lots of fun sight word activities!

I'm calling this fun Easter inspired activity, Sight Word Scramble. I made an egg for each of the ten sight words that we are currently working on. I simply cut small pieces of paper and wrote one letter on each piece. Each egg contains the letters for a single word. I also made a coloring list of the words.

To play, select an egg from the basket and dump out it's letters. Then use the coloring page to figure out which word you're building. Next, put the letters in the proper order and read your word out loud. Lastly, color your word so that you know which words you've already done.

You can win a sight word game, Erudition, from Quirky Mama before Saturday :)