Sight Words: An Easy Activity to Teach Early Readers

Learning sight words is a crucial part of early literacy. It isn’t always an easy topic to teach children though because they can easily lose interest. I have found that it is easier to teach kids to read when they are engaged with a fun activity. This is one of our favorite sight word activities as it combines a few different skills and has different approaches to keep things interesting. Plus, it was super easy to set up!

Before kids can learn to read, they have to know their alphabet! Check out these creative ideas to learn the alphabet and these alphabet books to help build the best foundation for early reading.

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What are Sight Words?

Sight words are common words that usually can’t be “sounded out”. That means that they have to be recognized by sight.

Examples include:

• a
• an
• at
• are
• be
• can
• down
• each
• find
• for
• he
• his
• have
• her
• I
• in
• is
• just
• like
• my
• make
• no
• on
• or
• said
• she
• the
• to
• they
• there
• that
• up
• was
• with
• what
• we
• you

There are many lists of sight words for different grades and age groups. They can be very hard to teach since the only real way to learn sight words is to practice and memorize them. That is what led me to develop this activity to help my son learn his sight words.

Setting up the Activity

All you need for this activity is:

• index cards (I used white because it is what I had at home. You can also use these fun colored ones instead)
• dark marker (I used a sharpie)
• clothespins (again you can either go with a plain version like I used or splurge for some fun colors)

I picked the sight words that I wanted to practice and wrote each one on a separate index card. These can be used as simple flash cards as well as for this learning activity.

Then, I wrote one letter on each of the clothespins. It is a good idea to make multiples for certain letters (vowels, “t”, “s”, and other common letters) so that you make sure you have more than enough to do multiple cards.

From there, I would present the card to my son and say the word. He would find the letter clothespins that matched the letters in each word and put the clothespin on the index card to spell the word. This makes for a bonus since it also helps him refine his fine motor skills!

Through practice and repetition, he not only learns the words but also how to spell them! That is a major mom win in my opinion.

Variations on Sight Words Activity

To switch things up, you can use the other side of the index cards. Instead of writing the entire word, leave out a blank for 1-2 letters and have kids find the missing letter to complete the word. This is a really fun way to explore not only sight words, but language in general. There are often multiple answers to go in the blank as you can see in the pictures below. “_an” can be completed by using a “c”, “m”, “r” etc. Not only does this help kids learn their sight words, it also helps them to see the connections between different words and build a great foundation for early literacy.

As kids progress and learn to read more, this activity can easily be adjusted to meet their level. Simply make new index cards with more complex words. I always love these activities that can grow with a child, don’t you?

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