This ping pong bounce game is a fun way to build skills in eye-hand coordination, fine motor skills, bilateral coordination, visual scanning, visual tracking, and more. We used a fun DIY ping pong bounce game to work on reading fluency but you could use this activity for any multisensory learning.
Ping Pong Bounce Game
A ping pong bounce game is exactly as it sounds, a game where you bounce ping pongs! You’ll need a target to bounce the ping pongs into, and this target can be any container which the player can use.
Younger children or those working on motor control and hand-eye coordination may use a larger bowl or a basket.
To play a ping pong bounce game, you’ll need just a few items:
Ping pongs
Container
Marker (to write on the ping pong balls)
Water (to put in the target bowl to make the task easier)
Ping Pong Bounce Skills
Playing a ping pong bounce activity like this one builds several skill areas at once:
Hand eye coordination
Motor planning
Fine motor control
Grasp and release
Visual tracking
Visual scanning
Visual convergence
Crossing midline
Force modulation
Ping Pong Bounce Game Ideas
We’ve been doing a bunch of tricky word games and activities recently as we practice Big Sister’s words for school. It’s fun to come up with creative ways to practice sight words and decodable words.
Manipulating Sight Words without flash cards really helps when it comes to encouraging new readers to go over (and over and over) novel words. Adding a different component (even taking the words outside for a Sight Word Scavenger Hunt) can make the learning easier.
Tricky Word Games
We made this tricky words ping pong ball bounce game one afternoon when we were practicing sight words and had a little fun bouncing our words around as we practiced.
This isn’t the first time we’ve used ping pong balls in our sight word practice…Sight Word Scooping and Matching was a lot of fun and part of the inspiration to get a little active with our sight words.
Amazon affiliate links are below.
We started with a handful of paper roll rings we’ve been using for all kinds of crafts and activities. The paper roll rings came in handy for this activity.
We used some of our pin pong balls (affiliate link) and I wrote words onto them with a permanent marker.
The ping pong balls were the perfect size to fit in the paper roll rings. We played for a while with this, just putting the ping pong balls into the rings, moving them around, and reading the words.
It was ping pong bounce fun!
The bouncing part was hard to photograph, but we would bounce the ping pong balls toward the tray and try to get them into the rings. Little Guy really liked this part and he got pretty good at bouncing the balls into the rings.
Looking for more tricky word activities? Try one of these:
We’ve been doing a bunch of fun sight words in the past few months and here, you will find all of our favorite sight word activities for kindergarten. This is a collection of all of our sight word activities, or multisensory learning activities focused on reading skills. The best thing about these hands-on reading activities is that they can be used for sight words as well as decodable words. These multisensory reading activities are perfect for beginning reading for kindergarten. Learning and practicing sight words can be fun, creative, and NOT include just repetition with flash cards. A little creativity and lot of fun are happening on this page. Get ready to learn through play. And have fun!
{Note: This post contains affiliate links.}
Creative Ways to Practice Kindergarten Sight Words
Sight Words and Decodable Words
When my older kids were learning to read, they came home with lists of “sight words”. They also came home with small stapled books where they inserted the sight word into sentences driven by pictures. They were “reading the pictures”.
Since then, sight words have shifted slightly to include common lists, but more of the decodable reading.
These hands on activities can be used with any early reading!
Sight words are not necessarily always irregular words. They may only be taught as sight words until the sounds in the word have been taught… then it becomes decidable.
Some sight words are truly words that are known by sight…there is no way to sound them out. Other sight words can be decoded.
High frequency words and not words that can be learned through decoding. For example… “what” is a sight word and should be learned as such.
Multisensory Reading Activities
The multisensory reading activities listed below incorporate whole body movement, heavy work input, and even vestibular input. These are just SOME ways to use all of our senses in learning high frequency words.
Other multisensory reading strategies can be used to decode parts of a word, or even sight words that are decodable. This is done by breaking apart the sounds that make up the word, or orthographically mapping the word.
Other multisensory reading strategies include:
pounding words and parts of words
tapping of words
moving cubes
moving chips or manipulatives like mini erasers or balls of play dough for sounds
using a red word/heart word for the tricky part of a “trick word” or sight word
spelling and arm tapping
writing on a bumpy screen and then feeling the bumps while spelling it aloud
The multisensory reading strategies below are creative ways to work on sight words
Use fun materials like ping pong balls like we did in our Sight Words Ping Pong Bounce Game. (That was an activity that Little Guy LOVED…and he’s not even learning sight words yet! Use those ping pong balls again for Sight Word Scooping and incorporate fine motor skills into sentence building.
This one went along with the book Bears on Wheels by Stan Berenstain. Sight Word Manipulatives used the same sight word cards in a hands-on learning activity.
More movement based learning happened when we incorporated the easel in Sight Word Sticky Easel.
A few more creative ways to learn: Does your Kindergartener love all things art? Try some stamping with Sight Word Bottle Cap Stampers.
We hope you’ve found some fun ways to learn and play with sight words with this list. Stop back often, because we’re adding new activities all the time. We’ll be sure to update this page with all of our latest sight word activities.
Need more ways to develop skills through play? Grab one of our Fine Motor Kits!
Working on fine motor skills, visual perception, visual motor skills, sensory tolerance, handwriting, or scissor skills? Our Fine Motor Kits cover all of these areas and more.
Check out the seasonal Fine Motor Kits that kids love:
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
We had some fish learning activities based on a penguin theme going on for a while around here. Penguin activities are so much fun for learning and play! This fish learning activity was a fun way to explore letters, words, and numbers AND incorporate our penguin theme. We did this learning and counting activity one day after we made our penguin themed snacks. Add it to the penguin yoga activity and penguin deep breathing activities to round out full-body movement and learning.
Fish learning activity
Penguin math is fun when it comes to catching fish for penguin food! Use these ideas for a polar bear theme, too.
We used sheets of scrapbook paper and construction paper to make fish shapes. Kids can cut these out to work on scissor skills.
Next, we drew a pond on a large sheet of crafting paper. I wrote words, letters, or numbers on the fish. On some, I attached a paperclip or clip. We used a net (from a Bug Net toy) or a fishing pole from a puzzle set to scoop up the fish like a penguin would.
You could also use a magnetic fishing pole from a puzzle set to catch the fish with clips on them. We scooped them in numerical order or in alphabetical order and then in random order too.
How fun would this be to read a few fun penguin books and then do some fishy counting to continue the penguin theme?
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
This sight word sensory tray is a multisensory sight word activity designed to help young children learn common words. There are some words that kids learn by heart. These “heart words” are what we used to call “sight words”. In this sight word activity, we are using some sight words from an old list as we did this activity many years ago. You could replace the words in the sensory word activity with any words, and even letters when learning letter formation, numbers, or a child’s name to make it a fun name activity. Let’s explore this sensory word activity…
Sensory Sight Word Activity for Learning Words
Some children are tactile learners. These are the children that learn through movement of their hands. We talk about this a bit in our post with a word scavenger hunt activity.
They NEED to move, fidget, tap, and wiggle those fingers and learning happens best when they are doing these movements. These kids focus on and recall information better when they are manipulating items in learning.
This sight word sensory tray is PERFECT for tactile learners (or kinesthetic learners).
There is a reason–Sight words are just that-words that are learned by sight. They are words that have no “rule” and are learned just through plain old memory.
But for the child who learns best through small motor actions, how are they supposed to learn those sight words just by looking at them and remembering them? A sight word sensory tray is the way to go for tactile learners and kids that are just bored with sight word memorization!
We’ve got a TON of sight word activities on the site that use tactile sensory play and movement if you are looking for more ways to help kinesthetic learners learn those sight words.
Sight Word Sensory Tray
You’ll need just a couple of materials for this activity. (Affiliate links are included in this post.)
Long tray Paper with sight words written on them (Cut a sheet of printer paper in half, length-wise.) Foam eggs
First, write out the sight words on the half sheets of paper. Write one word per sheet and write with large letters.
Place the sight word sheet in the tray and cover it with the foam eggs.
Then, start moving those eggs!
Kids can uncover just part of the eggs in the tray to reveal part of the sight word and then the whole word. They can identify the sight word by seeing part of the word or the whole thing.
There are several other ways to use this sight word sensory tray to help tactile learners with that sight word list.
Ask kids to trace the sight word by starting with one uncovered letter. Then, ask they to trace the remaining letters as they uncover each letter. Use a finger, the eraser end of a pencil, or a writing utensil.
Try to guess the sight word by uncovering just one or a few of the beginning letters.
Add a movement action for each letter as it’s uncovered. One example would be to “form” the letter with outstretched hands and legs.
For more information on tactile learners and sight words, check out fine motor movement learning activities like:
Sensory trays and writing trays can be a fun way to help young children learn sight words through motivating sensory play.
Having a variety of sensory ideas available to support letter and word learning is powerful because the sensory medium is simply a tool to reinforce learning.
When learning words like sight words, or commonly used words, the visual processing skill of visual discrimination is supported.
Visual discrimination skills are needed to discriminate between common letters and words like “with” and “which”.
Noticing the differences is a skill where we classify differences between the whole word by the difference letters (aka symbols) in the words. These differences in form are observed through the eyes as they receive visual input and the brain as it analyzes that information.
Visual discrimination occurs by the eyes and brain detecting differences in objects, utilizing working memory and stored memory to determine distinct differences or matched features.
Here are some ideas for things you could include on a sensory tray in order to teach sight words, letters, or numbers:
Sand or salt: Pour some sand or salt into the tray and bury small toys or objects with sight words written on them. Encourage children to dig through the sand or salt to find the hidden words and read them out loud.
Shaving cream: Spray shaving cream onto the tray and encourage children to write sight words in the cream with their fingers.
Rice or pasta: Pour rice or pasta into the tray and hide small objects with sight words written on them. Encourage children to sift through the rice or pasta to find the hidden words and read them out loud.
Play dough: Provide play dough and sight word cards, and encourage children to make the words out of the dough.
Water and food coloring: Fill the tray with water and add a few drops of food coloring. Write sight words on small pieces of paper and encourage children to identify and scoop out the words from the tray.
Feathers, pom-poms or pipe cleaners: Add colorful materials such as feathers, pom-poms or pipe cleaners to the tray and ask children to create sight words by forming letters with the materials.
Rainbow Handwriting Kit– This resource pack includes handwriting sheets, write the room cards, color worksheets, visual motor activities, and so much more. The handwriting kit includes:
Write the Room, Color Names: Lowercase Letters
Write the Room, Color Names: Uppercase Letters
Write the Room, Color Names: Cursive Writing
Copy/Draw/Color/Cut Color Worksheets
Colors Roll & Write Page
Color Names Letter Size Puzzle Pages
Flip and Fill A-Z Letter Pages
Colors Pre-Writing Lines Pencil Control Mazes
This handwriting kit now includes a bonus pack of pencil control worksheets, 1-10 fine motor clip cards, visual discrimination maze for directionality, handwriting sheets, and working memory/direction following sheet! Valued at $5, this bonus kit triples the goal areas you can work on in each therapy session or home program.
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
We’ve done quite a few sight words activities on this site. What’s cool is that the activities that we did with my now second grade daughter are still fun and working great with my kindergartner son this year. Today, I’ve got a sensory sight word activity using Cloud Dough.
Adding a tactile (and sensory) approach to sight words may just help the memorization of words “stick”. We made this cloud dough that was brightly colored and smelled great using a few materials we had in the house.
Cloud Dough Recipe for Sensory Exploration
To make the cloud dough, we used just a few ingredients (Affiliate links are included in this post):
Mix the baby powder and baby oil with your fingers. Use a Kitchen Mallet to crush the chalk into dust.
This is an EXCELLENT proprioceptive activity that the kids really got into. Smashing that chalk into smithereens requires a lot of muscle power and “wakes up” the muscles to the heavy work of pounding that hammer. Try this pounding activity before a quiet and calming activity like writing.
Sprinkle the chalk dust into the cloud dough and mix by hand. You can play with the cloud dough without the chalk dust, but we wanted a bright blue color.
It took us a little bit of experimentation, (and blue hands), but we found out that mixing liquid food coloring into the cloud dough (even mixed into water or mixed into extra oil) will not give this sensory dough a bright color. Instead, you’ll end up with dyed hands.
Now, start playing!
Cloud Dough Sight Word Activity
Cloud dough is very fun. It’s moldable and a great sensory dough to explore. We decided to add sight words to this sensory bin. I used bright index cards to write out Kindergarten sight words. We cut the words into smaller sizes and hid them in the cloud dough.
To play sight word games with Cloud Dough:
Write two sets of sight words. Play different games. Some of our favorite games to play with sight words can be done right in the cloud dough:
Play Memory with the sight words in the cloud dough. Hide and turn the sight word cards in the dough. Take turns looking for matches.
Scatter one set of sight words in the dough and the other set outside of the sensory bin. Take turns quickly looking for matches of words.
Create small balls of cloud dough. Push the cards into the dough and stand words up. Ask your child to read the words and smash the cloud dough balls. This game is always a hit with the kids.
Play Hide and Seek for sight words in the cloud dough.
We love creative sight words activities! Here are some of our favorite ways to work on name practice in kindergarten through hands-on play.
We’ve got a big collection of sight words. We started last year when Big Sister was in Kindergarten, and we’re continuing this year in first grade. The fun thing about our sight word activities is that they can be used and modified for all ages. When kids practice sight words, they need repetition to memorize the spelling of words that don’t follow rules of the English language. They are the tricky words that may be difficult to sound out. SO, making sight word practice fun is essential for kids!
We did this balloon sight word activity back in the summer months but are just getting around to sharing. This was such a fun way to practice first grade sight words, that we’ll be doing this one again!
Sight word activity with balloons:
I started by writing Big Sister’s sight words on the sticky side of masking tape, using a black marker. I taped these to balloons that were already blown up.
That’s it! When Big Sister saw the balloons with tape on them, she was very curious. It didn’t take her long to figure out that there were words written on the tape. Using the black marker makes it easy to see and read the words through the balloons.
She held the balloons up to her face to better read the sight words. This was a fun way to identify the the words.
We played a game where we put all of the balloons on the floor and kicked the words as I called out the sight word.
More ways to extend the play and learning using balloons and sight words:
Pop the balloons as they are read
Blow the balloons across a table. Call out a sight word and blow that balloon only. You can use a straw to make it even more difficult.
Balloon static games: Using static electricity, stick certain sight words the wall.
Balloon scavenger hunts
Balloon races-don’t drop the balloon.
Looking for more sight word activities? Try some of these:
Today, I’d love to share a sight word reading and writing activity with you. Young readers and writers need lots and lots of practice reading and writing sight words. This quick and easy activity fits the bill. Add a fine motor component to boost the skills that kids need for pencil grasp and other skills, including the bilateral coordination component, visual motor skill work, and fine motor strengthening!
Sight Word Game
Sight Word Activity: Roll, Pop and Pull
Materials
Here is what you will need:
muffin tin
6 toilet paper rolls
scissors
assorted colors of tissue paper
12 rubber bands
black marker
12 small strips of paper
writing paper and a pencil/pen
die
tweezers
Set-Up
1. Cut each of the toilet paper rolls into two pieces so that you have a total of twelve pieces.
2. Cover the top of each toilet paper roll with tissue paper and secure with a rubber band. On top of each structure write a number. Use each number (1-6) two times.
3. On the 12 strips of paper, write sight words that your child needs to practice reading and writing. Stuff each roll with a sight word strip of paper and place them all in the muffin tin.
4. Gather your die, tweezers, writing paper and writing utensil.
Play and learn sight words with a sight word game!
To play, the child rolls the die. Then with their finger or the tweezers they pop the circle with the corresponding number. Remove the sight word with the tweezers. This makes for great fine motorskill practice!
The child should read the word and then write the word the number of times that corresponds to their roll. Play continues until all circles have been popped.
There you have a fun and easy sight word game to practice reading and writing skills!
Looking for more sight word activities? Check out these other ideas!
What other hands-on ideas do you have for practicing sight words?
Jodie Rodriguez is a mom of two little boys (2 and 3), a National Board Certified educator and creator of the Growing Book by Book blog. Jodie has a passion for early literacy and all things related to reading. Connect with Jodie on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or Google +.
This sight word activity has been so much fun. I got the idea when Big Sister came home from school with some sight word crayon rubbings. She made them during centers in her Kindergarten class. I had the idea that we could make our own version at home for added practice (and fun!).
We have a ton of fun sight word activities here on the blog. This one has been sitting out on our train table for a few days now and has been getting quite the work out with lots of sight word crayon rubbings happening!
Sight word activity for Kindergarteners
I started with a list of Big Sister’s sight words and wrote them out with a hot glue gun on rectangles of cardstock. These dried and I pulled off the bits of dried hot glue strings.
These sight word cards were ready by the time Big Sister came home from school. I had them sitting out with some paper and crayons and she got busy rubbing the words. This is a great sensorial way to learn and practice those words! Feeling the letters on the cards adds a fun way to learn through touch.
She practiced a little handwriting too by writing the words. It was great to overhear her read the words to her little sister as she did the crayon rubbings and wrote the words out.
We have tons of pages of these sight words now. This sight word practice is a huge hit in our house!
This sight word sensory bin is an old activity here on the website, from when our own children were just learning to read. When they were in kindergarten, sight words were all the rage. Now, these strategies are not used as much, but the practice of learning words and letters continues. You can use components of this sensory bin activity in beginning reading for kindergarteners to practice reading words, identifying letters, or matching uppercase to lower case. The sky is the limit, and all you need is recycled paper!
While we used recycled paper for this sight word sensory activity, you could use any sensory bin base material.
Sight Word Sensory Bin
I love this sight word sensory bin idea (or any way that you use the sensory bin idea) to involve motor skills and multisensory learning into reading skill development. As OT providers, we love play-based learning and hands-on activities, and this one fits the bill!
We’ve used a lot of fun and different materials to practice sight words this school year. Sight Words with Ping Pong Balls and Sight Word Practice with string are just two fun ways we’ve practiced the work list that comes home with Big Sister each week. Just recently, we got a note from her teacher saying “Awesome job on the sight words!” This was a pretty proud mama and all of our practice is paying off!
Shredded Paper Sensory Bin
This sensory based activity is a Sight Word Sensory bin…and just one more creative ways we’ve been practicing homework words. Putting a creative spin on the practice makes repetition fun and easy. You can find more links to our other creative sight word activities at the bottom of this post.
I had this sensory bin ready to go when Big Sister came home from school one day. It was a fun way for Baby Girl and Little Guy to play while they waited for their sister to get off of the school bus.
Put those paper shreds to work and use them in fun play. Shredded paper is a great sensory bin filler.
We’ve used it a few other times and it actually about today because Little Guy remembered doing this Snowy Farm Sensory Bin activity and asked if we could pull out some shredded paper again.
The shredded paper can even be dyed to give your sensory bin a colorful spin. We dyed shredded paper pink in our Valentine’s Day sensory bin.
Big Sister played in the sensory bin and said the words as she pulled them out. We made sentences together with the words from the bin.
Big Sister wanted to add her entire sight word collection to the sensory bin. It turned out to be mostly sight words! I think we’re on to a new sensory bin filler 😉
Looking for more sight word activities for beginner readers? Try these fun ideas:
to crush the chalk into dust. 
