Creative Sight Word Practice with String

Big Sister has been practicing her sight words a lot!  we keep practicing and practicing and she is really confident in her ability.  Knowing my little girl, she needs to feel confident in order to try new things.  If she thinks something is hard (even something she’s never tried before) it is just rough from the start.  All this practice is really working for her.  We don’t go crazy, just one practice each day with an added little twist to make it fun.
We practiced four words one afternoon with an added item…string!

Creative Sight Word Practice with String

I cut lengths of three different colors (only because I didn’t have four colors).  We used the string a few different ways. 
I made two columns of the sight words, one with the upper case version and the other column with the lower case version.  Big Sister used the string to match up each pair.
This was a hands on version of a lot of worksheets that you see in Kindergarten workbooks.  This activity allows the child to visually scan left to right (important for a beginner reader!) and to encourage visual memory.  For a child that is having trouble identifying a new sight word, this is a great way to promote visual memory of the spelling of the words and the way the word looks.  
For a younger child, this would be fun for letter/number identification or shape identification and matching.  There are so many variations that could be done with this simple activity!

Next, I scattered the words around on the table and showed Big Sister how to use the string to circle the words.

Big Sister had follow directions to circle “am” with the yellow string, “the” with the blue string, and “my” with the red string.  We did several steps for multi-level direction following, but this could be done step-by-step.  You could even just hand the child any random color and ask them to circle a specific word.   This is a good activity for visual scanning as they search for the word on the table.
We used the string in one other way.  I taped the string to the backs of the words like the top picture of this post shows.  We used the string to pull the word across the table and read what the card said.  It was a fun way to “fish for sight words”!
How many ways can you think of to use string as a learning tool?

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