Do you have coloured popsicle sticks? Use them to learn sight words with this fun DIY game!
Sight words are words that are presented in the English language frequently. I have found lists here.
I simply wrote a the second grade Dolch sight words onto popsicle sticks. You can make different sets with the different levels of the 220 Dolch sight words. (I use the same color for words starting with the same letter, and for categorizing purposes and to help with reversal correction, for instance the words starting with ‘b’ and ‘d’ are different colors.)
Each player gets a turn to pick a stick, and read the word. If he/she is right, he/she gets to keep the stick, but beware of the blanks!
I left some sticks blank. Why? When you play the game, and you pick a blank, you have to give all your “winnings” back to the bank(cup). The blank is kept apart then.
The player with the most sticks when the cup is empty, wins!
One could make it even more fun by adding a rule that you have to use the sight word you pick in a sentence. This way the adult can see if the learner understands the meaning of the word and it is not just rote learning.
I use this sight word popsicle stick game as an ice breaker to get to know my new kiddos I see for remedial therapy: to break the ice socially, and for me to see which words we need to still work on. Most of the kids ask to play the game every time they come to me, so I guess they are having fun, and fun learning is what we like!
And get this Sight Words Booklet to easily keep track of sight word levels mastered!
This is a good investment if you teach kids to read!
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