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Reading Lesson, Sight Words
Shelley Yamnitz
October 2, 1996
Strategy: Sight Words
Objective
Student will learn various high frequency sight words by playing
Steal the Words card game. They will then identify these
words in the context of choral reading a book.
Reasoning
Sight words are very important in building the confidence of
beginning readers. By giving students repeated exposure to individual
sight words, it will be easier for them to pick the words out
and read them in context. This will add to the natural, flowing
pace of reading that is every child's goal. Placing the learning
of sight words in a game format makes this overwhelming task less
of a chore and adds fun. Also, it's important to follow the game
of learning the words with reading a book, to emphasize to the
students the value of knowing the words.
Materials
64 notecards, each card printed with a word on it twice, one right-side-up,
one
upside down
Several books for the students to pick from
Procedure
Deal 4 cards to each student and have them lay them out in front
of them facing up. Lay 4 cards out in the center of the students.
Explain the rules to the students as follows:
-whoever picks the word with the most letters goes first
-when it's your turn, if you have a word that matches one in
the middle of the
circle, you can take the card and add it to a private pile
of your own.
You can only take a card when you read the word on it. Always
keep four cards per student and four cards in the middle.
-another way to add cards to your individual private pile is
when it's your turn,
if you have a card that matches the top card on someone else's
private pile,
you can say the word and take that person's entire private pile.
-the game continues until all the cards are matched
-the student with the most cards wins
After they play the game, read through all of the sight word
notecards with the students again. Then allow them to choose
a book that they want to read. Have the students choral read
the book with the teacher. Whenever a student successfully reads
one of the sight words just learned, point this out to them.
Be sure and provide any needed help with the more difficult words
they may not know yet.
Reflections
This lesson plan turned out to be a real disaster with our kids.
With such a limited amount of time, the game proved to be too
complex for them to learn quickly. In addition, they focused
much more on the competitive aspect of the game instead of actually
learning the sight words. It was very difficult to make them
wait for their turn, and they kept trying to make matches without
actually reading the word. We didn't have enough time to play
the whole game, so they weren't exposed to all the sight words
we had intended.
We stopped the game early so that the students would have time
to read the books and apply what they had learned, which was very
important. Ethan and Jeff read a Deputy Dan book with
Shelley, and Darien and Meghan read Clifford with Amy.
Ethan and Jeff struggled reading their book. Jeff made the statement
that he thought Shelley would read the book to him. Even after
learning the sight words in the game, they both had a lot of trouble
reading even the easiest of words, such as 'it'. Therefore, for
Ethan and Jeff, this lesson really did not benefit them at all.
Darien and Meghan were much better readers, so they found most
of the sight words to be too easy when playing the game. They
also read most of the book with few problems. The only sight
words they had any problems with were those such as 'enough'.
Therefore, this lesson was probably way too easy for them, and
they didn't benefit much, either.
As a result of the failure of this lesson plan, we decided to
divide the students into two groups (Ethan/Jeff and Darien/Meghan)
so that we could focus on their differing ability levels better,
at least for a couple of sessions.
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