Video:Reading Skills: How to Make Sight Word Flash Cardswith Craig Selinger
There are a number of different ways to teach sight words to students learning to read, and flash cards are one of the best. Here is a video showing how to use flash cards to teach sight words.See Transcript
Transcript:Reading Skills: How to Make Sight Word Flash Cards
Hi, I'm Craig Selinger, a certified speech language therapist, for Brooklyn Learning, here for About.com. I am going to explain how to make and use sight word flash cards.
Choosing Sight Words
A sight word vocabulary is a store of words a student can identify and or read automatically. They know the word by sight. They do not need to sound out the word. Sight words should include high frequency words, which are words commonly used in every day conversation and common words you see in print. One of the best sources to find sight words is from the Dolce word list. You can actually get it online for free. Learning these 220 words can help a child read approximately 50 to 75 percent of what is printed in almost any piece of children's literature.
Making Sight Word Flash Cards
To make sight word flash cards, all you need are index cards. Ideally, three by five inches. You can use index cards that are lined or ones without lines. I would definitely recommend that if the child writes the flash card, use lined index cards. If you're an adult, a pen is sufficient, or if you want to make it more salient, you can use a marker. If the child writes that flash card, I definitely recommend that the child uses a pencil. When you make a sight word flash card, it's important that your print is one is lower case, you're using manuscript and that each letter is approximately two to three inches. I will write the word here.
Playing Games With Sight Word Flash Cards
What better way to teach sight words to kids than through games? This exercise, I've decided to use three sight words and I've duplicated each sight word to total six index cards. So, what we're going to do is we're going to flip over two cards and we're going to try to match the sight words. What does this say? "Where, where…" Nice. Can you find the word here? There you go. Find the word "said." So, one convenient way to practice sight words is to p'ace the sight words index cards on a ring and place it in a folder, and to have a sheet of loose leaf paper that's lined, and this sheet is a way for the child to practice writing the sight word.
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