Sight Word Fishing

Practice sight words with this fun sight word fishing activity!

 

 

 I set up this messy learning activity to help my 5-year-old son with his school sight word homework. Adding a messy play element to a learning activity is a really clever way to encourage learning. Getting hands-on (or hands in!) with new concepts is a great way to reinforce new information in a fun and engaging manner.

Preparation

 

I like to get my son involved as much as I can in setting up a learning activity. I find this helps to engage him from the very start. 

Begin by asking your child to choose the colour of the waterbeads they’d like to use in their activity. Then following the packets instructions, help your child to measure the correct amount of water to ensure the waterbeads grow to their optimum size. This usually takes around 4 hours, so make sure to leave ample time before you plan to actually do the exercise. It’s worth reminding your child at this point the importance of never placing waterbeads into their mouth. If they do accidentally swallow one, then please seek medical advice as soon as possible.

 

Whilst the beads are growing take a selection of plastic fish or other sea creatures and use a black permanent marker to write the sight words you want to practice on the bottom of the fish. We used the words the, and, to.

When you are ready to do the activity find a suitable container and ask your child to pour the waterbeads into it. Hand them a can of shaving foam and let them squirt it over the waterbeads and then give them a good mix together. 

 

  

Then drop in your fish and get ready to go fishing. Giant tweezers are a great tool to use for this, but if you don’t have any to hand then you could use a spoon. When your child had “caught” a fish ask them to read out the word on the bottom of the sea creature. If the shaving foam is obscuring the word have a bowl of water handy for them to dip it into to clean it up a little. 

 

  

 

If they don’t know the word straight away don’t panic, just let them have another go and be patient with them only stepping in to help if they are really struggling or getting very frustrated. Make sure to leave plenty of time to complete this activity.

 

We then washed off the shaving foam from our waterbeads and repeated the activity the following day but this time adding water and washing up liquid and blowing bubbles into to hide our sea creatures.

 

Such a fun way to practice sight words! What other ideas do you have for “sight word fishing”?

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