Learning Sight Words

Catherine is in kindergarten, which means "sight words." Catherine has mastered her first list of sight words (20 of them!) and so her teacher has given her a second list (another 20!). A few days ago I came home from work and found this in our family room:

Robby was doing a great job teaching Catherine her second list of sight words (I had already made the flash cards). Robby was making her spell out each word, then telling her what the word was and using it in a sentence. He would make her spell and say the word several times. (Ignore Robby's messy clothes - he had spent the day at one of our rental properties painting.)

We have been doing flash cards every day, actually a few times a day, for a month now. They can get a little boring. So, a friend of mine suggested that I make a bingo game out of the sight words. I did this and taught Catherine how to play bingo.

This has worked like a charm because she LOVES it. She asks to play bingo every day. I made the bingo game boards with different color markers, so Catherine will insist on playing each of the colors every time.

We had some flat-bottomed stones which we have used in the past for sorting and patterning practice (thank you dollar store!). We are still having to push Catherine to play bingo fairly quickly to reinforce her immediate knowledge of the words by sight. But, it is a fun way to work with those words with Catherine.