Sing THOSE Sight Words!
I feel like over the last few years as a newbie teacher I've tried countless strategies to teach sight words. This year I tried something completely different. I placed ALL of our county required sight words on different colored index cards and placed in a pocket chart. I made a up two songs, one for the first half of the words and a second for the rest. I sang the words to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" and the last part to "Twinkle Twinkle". I had little group of singers this year so I new they would love it! There were rules to singing and chanting the chart. They had to always be looking at the word being pointed to and if I stopped on a word, they also had to stop singing or chanting. Sometimes I treated it like a game, I stopped to randomly select a word and call of students to see if they knew it.
Click on the image the watch!
The children LOVED this last year and often during their free time they would pick up the pointer and sing the words themselves once they memorized the tune. They used it when they could not recall how to read or write the word. By the middle of the year several of the students knew all 54 words. Many started reading 1st grade words and 16 out of 19 could read books that blew my mind! Yes at first they are dependent on the song to read the words, but when they see them over and over they quickly file it in their memory! I will continue to do this every year!
*IMPORTANT: When testing DO NOT display the words in the same order as when they sing. I also make sure there was not a chart anywhere in sight! :)
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