Enjoy these cards for learning to identify coins and their values in your changeable dice!
Here are downloads for digital time to the quarter hour that can be used in changeable dice. I choose which times I am target and place them in the dice. Then, depending on skill level, the kiddo either reads the time or makes the time on our toy clock.
The Meet the Sight Words product line has been absolutely amazing in my classroom! Sight words can be very difficult for some kiddos to learn, but they hold amazing power to allow kids to begin reading – so they must be learned! These tools have helped to gradually introduce my kiddos to the sight words. I have found that once students master these sight words, they seem to have developed the learning skills to continue learning new words.
The whole system begins with the videos - and for many kids they alone are enough to provide the jump start into reading sight words. The videos are very boring for an adult, but my kiddos, even my "cool" second graders really enjoy them. They show the child a sight word and then animate it in some way, all the while saying the word. For example, "one" becomes an ant who is at a picnic and "said" becomes a cupcake assembly line. Then after a few seconds, the animation fades away leaving only the word. At the end of the dvd there is a "guessing game" where, without saying anything they slowly move the word towards it's animated version to see if the child can recognize the word with fewer prompts - my kids love playing that part of the dvd!
The company has also made flashcards to go with the movies. The cards for all three videos come in one set. The cards seem very durable and have been through a lot of "loving" in our room. One one side is the image of the fully animated word and on the other side is the word in print. We turn them into a game where the child tries to read the printed word, and if they can't I flip it to the animated side for them to try to read. They earn 2 points for every word read in print and one point for every animated word read. They are trying to beat their own score.
There are also a collection of simple stories that have been written using almost only sight words as introduced in the Meet the Sight Words dvds. The first set of books uses only words in the first dvd, the second uses words in the first two dvds, and the third uses words from all three dvds. I just received these books for Christmas, but already it's easy to see how being able to read these books is increasing the reading confidence of my students!
If you have a kiddo struggling with learning sight words - and consequently struggling to like reading because it is "way too hard!" I recommend trying out some or all of these products; they are well made and have made such an improvement for many of my kiddos! And who doesn't love hearing a child read to you say "I know that word now, it's one, one is shaped like an ant!"
Here are downloads for the Dolch Sight Word Lists that can be used in changeable dice. I use these word lists frequently with my kiddos. For more information and resources for teaching sight words, see here.
The Dolch sight words are lists of the most common 220 words in books written for children. There is an additional list of the 95 most common nouns in children’s books.
Many of these words are words that cannot be sounded out with phonics and that children must just automatically recognize, thus they require special teaching.
A huge goal in our classroom is to teach my students to read these lists of words. Being able to do so increases their reading speed which increases their fluency and their comprehension. The more of these words they can read, the greater the variety and difficulty level of books they can read – a major self-esteem boost to a struggling child!
I love using this website for downloading word lists for parents and flashcards for practice in our classroom. Mrs. Perkins has done a fabulous job compiling a variety of presentation methods for these words.
Ways we practice the Dolch Sight Words:
(images are from Amazon.com, click to see the product)
- with changeable dice
- with flashcards (speed or drill races)
- with Meet the Sight Words (more on this to come!)
- with these Cloze Passages
- with the BOB Books Sight Word Readers
