Using Sight Words – Crafty Classroom Review

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Sight words can be a wonderful introduction to reading for your child. Luckily, we have been able to review a program from The Crafty Classroom all about sight words!

My older two children taught themselves to read through the use of sight words. Our toy bins were all labelled and they began being able to associate the words with the items. They were also able to pick up on many sight words through the daily stories that we read.

We found this to be a stress-free approach to learning to read. We simply interacted with our environment and read stories.

My 3rd child is having a little bit of a harder time with this approach so when I saw this resource, Sight Word of the Week Program, I knew it was something that I wanted to try. I wanted to be able to add some more direct learning experiences into his day to fulfil his desire to learn to read.

The Sight Word of the Week Program is a digital product. It is a 386 page, full-colour ebook created by The Crafty Classroom.

Dolch Sight Words

In the 1940s, Edward William Dolch, PhD compiled a list of 220 sight words that a child should learn to automatically recognize. These words are then broken down into five categories based on age and grade level.

The Crafty Classroom, used this list when creating their Sight Word of the Week Program using all 40 Dolch 220 Pre-Primer words.

During this review period, we were able to work through the following words:

• the
• to
• and
• a
• I
• you
• it
• in

This is only a small sample of the 40 sight words within this program.

Favourite Activities

My son had two very clear favourites when it came to the activities within this ebook. He had done very similar style activities in a game he was familiar with for letter recognition, so he appreciated the overlap and ease of entry for this product.

Fishing For Sight Words

‘in’, ‘you’, ‘a’ are pictured above

Fishing For Sight Words begins with practice for writing the word you are working on. Below the writing practice is a fishing pond full of different sight words.

My child love finding and underlining or circling the words he was able to find. This kind of “hide and seek” activity, as he called it, really motivates him. He is proud of himself when he is able to find all of the words and I love seeing that pride on his face. It really motivates both of us to continue.

Sight Word Dab

‘it’, ‘I’, ‘and’ are pictured above

My son is 6 years old and loves to dab, so when he heard the name of this activity he thought it was hilarious. He would dab after finding each word.

The program suggests using a bingo dabber when you find the words, hence the name. Alternative suggestions of crayon, coins, or smushed play-doh are also offered. We have an abundance of stickers so we used those as well as a crayon to complete the majority of the pages.

Because my son really enjoyed these pages, I also took screenshots of the pages and make a JPEG so he could colour the words in digitally.

Family Activity

While this product was targeted towards my one child, my youngest also enjoyed participating.

He is not quite ready for sight words just yet but we were able to use these pages for letter recognition and fine motor skill development (ie colouring). The word search page proved a little difficult for my one child but allowed for a perfect “hide and seek” letter activity for his younger brother. As one searched for the words on the Sight Word Dab sheet, the other searched for the letters in the word search page.

Overall, we really enjoyed this product.

Because it is a digital version, we would head to our local library to use their printer to print out the pages for the week. We were also able to search the library for books that had the sight word we were working on in the title. Combining these activities with a fun library trip, was always motivation to continue with the next word the next week.

This is an excellent resource if you are looking for a program to incorporate sight words into your homeschool toolkit. When we are ready to progress past the words included in this level, I will look at other Crafty Classroom products.

If you want to see reviews of other Crafty Classroom products, please click the image below.