Sight Words

    Sight words are a large part of our planned school time.  In fact, the only other topic we currently have a daily scheduled time for is writing practice.  Math is mostly taught through the day and science is thrown in sporadically and also taught as a teaching opportunity arises.  We started homeschooling slowly.  She was learning without me going out of my way to teach her, so I was not in a rush. The only things I was concerned with planning were the topics that i didn't feel came as naturally in our day or  needed a little extra practice.  Sight word reading is one of those things. 
    I tried to approach sight words in a more natural method, as I have other things, but it just didn't work.  The princess loves stories!  She has always had an incredible attention span when it comes to sitting for a book, but I found that she does not like her stories interrupted for me to point out words.  I don't blame her! It is important that a story has a smooth flow.  If I stop between pages to show her the words I read, the flow disappears.  We found out that games with a focus on high frequency reading words works well for us.
    I introduced our first set of words by making a sight word matching game.  It was incredibly easy.  The princess painted on the front side of  index cards.  I then cut each index card in half and wrote words one the back, making sure to write each word twice. It worked well for a very long time.  After a while I decided to add a little variety and found a few ideas on pinterest that have helped make practicing sight word reading fun.
    Today we did something with these sight words.  My idea originated from The Teacher wife. A teacher used paper chains to track how many books students read, encouraging them to read 100 books before the end of the school year.   I had previously cut fifty strips of construction paper and wrote sight words on 12 of them.  When we started our school time today, I showed her these strips of paper and told her we were making a paper chain with the words she reads correctly.  Every time she got a word correct we added a link to the chain using that strip of paper and a stapler.  I had been so excited to introduce this to her that I was thrilled she took to it.  Out of the twelve words, she read eleven correctly!  The length of the chain excited her.  This activity will be repeated once a week until she has read 100 words.  We will call it Word Chain Wednesday and it should work as a reward system for all of that sight word practice we do through the week.  I am already brainstorming for a special thing we can do to celebrate that 100th word!