One of the best literacy gifts Pea got for Christmas this year was the Pop For Sight Words game. It’s a pretty simple toy–a popcorn box filled with sight words printed onto little cardboard pieces of popcorn. There are also some instructions included on how to play the “official” game, but we haven’t played it that way yet. Instead, we’ve made up a bunch of different games we can play with the pieces of popcorn.

POP for Sight Words Game Average Rating: 20 total customer reviews...

Pea’s favorite way of playing right now pits her against us. She picks a word and tries to read it (preferably by sight, but we’ll let her try to sound it out). If she can read it within three seconds, she gets to keep it in her stack. If she can’t we get the piece. One important action to take here is to not just read the word and put it in your own stack. Make sure you show your child the word as you say it. Remember, we’re working on sight words here, so it really drives it home for them to see the word and hear it at the same time. The good thing about the words included with the kit is that many of them are really hard to sound out (“when”, “where”, etc.), so it really emphasizes sight word learning.

We play until we have 10 words in our pile–these are words that she could not read. Then we give her an opportunity to “steal”. We show her every word in our stack, and if she can read it she gets to steal it to her pile. Another option would be to wait until we’ve gone through all the words and give her only one chance to steal, and we may change to that option later. But by having a “steal” round every 10 words it gives her a chance to see and hear the words she’s having trouble with several times throughout the game.

At the end of the game, she gets to count all of the words in her pile (not a bad math activity either), and we keep a running score of how many words she’s able to read. We’ve seen some really good improvement, and we’ve noticed that the more often we play the game the more quickly her score rises. Repetition!

Note: the packaging makes this game very convenient and fun for the kids, but there’s no reason to purchase it necessarily. You could make your own sight word cards yourself. We’ll probably end up doing this ourselves in order to expand the number of words involved.

Back by popular demand (and because some people are signing up for last year’s) we’re excited to announce this year’s giveaway. Last year’s giveaway was really popular, but we realized that we sort of limited the scope of it since it was a toy for a specific skill level. So this year we’re going to do something a little different…we’ll let the winner choose the prize.

This year’s choices are coming straight off our own shopping list for our girls, so you’ll know they’ve are Ana-approved!

Just as a side note…please don’t think limit our kids to reading and literacy toys. We’re only including those here because this is a reading site. They also love to play with craft toys, crayons/paint/chalk, counting and math games (that could be a whole different site), and anything with a Disney Princess on it. Now…let’s get to the choices!!!

Pop for Letters Game

We can’t wait to get this toy! There are so many fun things you can do with this! Memory match games for capital and lower case letters, shuttle runs (quickly becoming a favorite activity at our house) matching cases or sounds to letters, changing the first letter of a word to make a new word, etc. The possibilities are literally endless. Yeah…you could do the same thing with a few pieces of paper, but the fact that this is popcorn themed makes it way more fun and inviting for the kids.

Pop for Sight Words Game

Just like the Pop Letters game, but with sight words–endless possibilities! “Quiz games” with multiple kids to see who can read the word first, putting words together to make sentences, and once the kids can read all of these words you can play games for parts of speech sorting and spelling bees. You can even use the Pop Letter Game with this toy to create prefixes and suffixes for the sight words!

Pretend and Play School Set

Not necessarily a literacy game, but our girls love to play school, and the Pea just happens to teach Bug letters and sounds in almost every class since reading is her favorite subject. It really has helped drive home all the things Bug is learning, and we’re so excited the baby will hopefully have two teachers when it’s her turn to start school!

Silly Sentences

I remember Ana taking a long time to prepare for centers when she was a teacher so the kids in her class could play this exact game! It’s so convenient to have it made for you, and even better that the kids can go grab this game and play any time they want. Some ideas for extension activities are to have the kids draw a picture of the silly sentences they make or create entire stories based on the sentences.

How to Enter

That would be useful information, huh? Just like last year, all you have to do to be eligible to enter the contest is like us on Facebook. That means like us on our Fan Page, not like this post (although you’re welcomed to do that as well). We’ll randomly choose one of our fans at midnight on December 13, 2011 and contact the winner through Facebook to find out what prize they’d like to receive.

Thanks for your continued support this year. Merry Christmas!

A while back, Ana made up a fun game we call Sight Word Shuttle Runs that not only helps the kids with learning new sight words, but also lets them burn up some energy. We just realized at dinner last night that we can play the game in reverse too.

The original game was to have the child look at a word, read it correctly, then run to a designated spot to pick up pennies, toy soldiers, stickers, or whatever else motivates your child.

The reverse game is to say the word to the child, then have them run to the designated spot to find the correct word written on an index card with a bunch of other words written on cards. If they bring back the right word, they get the motivational item to add to their pile. If not, they take the card back and try again.

Yet another fun twist to help build vocabulary is to begin a sentence and leave off the last word, having them run and pick out the word that makes the most sense to complete the sentence.

This post originally appeared at Reading Coach Online. Thanks for visiting and supporting our site!

Mama Bird With Her Word Eggs

We’re doing an animal unit in our co-op, so I thought I’d share an example of how you can incorporate a book and craft activity into the unit. Preschool and kindergarten kids love doing crafts, and it’s great when you can tie everything together to help them make connections.

Today we focused on birds all day, and we read “An Egg Is Quiet” in class. This is a really nice book I found at the library. It has great information on all types of eggs–bird eggs, reptile eggs (we learned about reptiles last week), insect eggs, fish eggs, and even dinosaur eggs. We learned about dinosaurs in our last school unit!

It’s full of illustrations of different types of eggs, which let us match pictures of eggs with pictures of birds, and some great vocabulary words like “shapely”, “clever”, and “texture”.

Page Full Of Eggs From "An Egg Is Quiet"

After we read the book, we made paper nests to hold “sight word eggs”. On each paper egg, we wrote a sight word on either side. The kids can go through the eggs like they would flash cards, and each time they recognize the word they get to put the egg into the nest. For the nests, we just glued the bottom of the nest onto the paper and left the top open so that the eggs could be placed inside.

As you can tell by the un-named species represented in the first photo, they also have fun coloring the birds.

Some of the kids in our co-op know many more sight words than others, but that’s ok. Each child gets his/her own set of eggs with the words they are currently working on.

The younger siblings (2 year olds) have been participating in school a lot this year, and they spend time each week making animal letters. For them, we changed the egg/nest activity a little bit. So far they’ve made it up to ‘H’. For them, the game is to match the lowercase letter on the egg with the jumbled capital letter on the page.

Capital and Lowercase Letter Matching

Here’s a quick and easy game you can play in the car or around the house.

Learning to count the number of syllables in words they hear and say can help your child learn to “chunk” sounds in a word together when they are reading. A simple way to introduce this concept is to have them make a fist and place it just under their chin. Whenever they say a word, they can count how many times their chin bumps their fist to count the number of syllables in the word.

You can be in charge of keeping a running total of all the syllables they’ve counted, or make it a math/counting game by having them add the syllables in the last word they counted to their total. You can even challenge them to get a “high score” by learning and saying bigger and bigger words to increase their vocabulary.

I went downstairs for a cup of coffee this morning and saw Ana playing a new game with Pea. This one combines sight words with fitness (i.e. “energy release”). How lucky are we that she’s able to make up stuff like this on the spot?!?!

Pea is a very “high energy” kid. Sometimes when she’s really revved up we go out in the yard and do shuttle runs to help her release some tension and empty the tank. You may have done shuttle runs if you ever played basketball, soccer, rugby, etc. The basic concept is that you run to one point, touch the ground, run back to the starting point, touch the ground, and repeat until you are gassed. We don’t make her do this–she loves it on her own.

The game Ana came up with today was to put several slips of paper with sight words (“and”, “or”, “the”, “she”, etc.) written on them into a hat. That’s the starting point. The game is to take a word out of the hat and read it by sight, not by sounding it out. When she reads the word correctly, she gets to run all the way down the hallway to pick up an item out of a bucket. Use whatever motivates your child–marshmallows, pennies, small toys–for them to retrieve and bring back.

I could not believe how much she loved this game. The best part is that it’s very easy to add more and more words to change the difficulty level. And for a bonus, Bug was following her the whole time. She loved chasing her sister up and down the hall and repeating the words!

Here’s a quick and easy twist on a game your kids already play that can help them work on their phonemic awareness. You are probably all too familiar with I Spy With My Little Eye, where your child guesses which object you see based on the color you tell them. For example, you may say, “I spy with my little eye something…yellow.” And your child will guess all the yellow things she sees until she chooses the banana you were spying.

Try it this way the next time you’re playing–”I spy with my little eye something that begins with the ‘b’ sound.” Now, instead of colors, your child with look for objects that begin with a sound. Recognizing the sound and matching it up with an object is a phonemic awareness exercise. Don’t be afraid to explore other sounds like the ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ sounds.

You can even make it a phonics game by saying, “I spy with my little eye something that begins with the letter ‘B’.” This will require your child to match up the letter with the sound it makes.

Good news from the WSJ! The author of “Where the Wild Things Are” is publishing a new book, “Bumble-Ardy“, soon!

This sounds like a pretty funny book, all about about a kid (pig) who celebrates his birthday for the first time when he turns 9.  Admittedly, there are some pretty high expectations already set, but it sounds like “Bumble-Ardy” won’t disappoint! Amazon is already taking (discounted) pre-orders, and the September release date means it will be a perfect Christmas gift for 2011. We’re getting some shopping done early for A Book On Every Bed 2011!

Some of you may have noticed the pace of new posts has slowed (even more) over the past couple of months. We’re very happy to tell you that the reason is that Ana is in a family way once again. For those of you who aren’t from the Southeast–she’s pregnant. Unfortunately for Ana, that means 20 weeks of extreme illness, 24 hours a day.

So for the past few months we’ve been in “survival mode” around our house, and that means housekeeping is at a minimum, much less blogging. The homeschool co-op had to go on a hiatus as well. The good news is that she experienced the same thing with the first two pregnancies, and the kids were both born healthy, so we’re hoping that bodes well for this one too. The other good news is that we are almost out of the woods…the nauseas has mostly subsided, and now she’s building her strength back up.

On a less happy note, we learned this past week that our dear friend Coupon Katie has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Many of you know Katie and/or follow her blog, so you already know what a great, strong, and inspirational person she is. On top of that, she can tell you how to get a bunch of stuff for free at Walgreens and end up having them give you money. Please keep Katie and Shawn (the Coupon Koala) in your thoughts and prayers as they overcome this obstacle.

We’ve been playing this phonemic awareness game lately to help Pea not only develop some physical coordination, but also strengthen her ability to think on her feet. It’s very easy to play, and lots of fun for the kids.

Blow up a balloon and punch it into the air. As you hit the balloon, say a word–any random word will do, but you may want to start with one syllable words until your child catches on to the rules. You child then hits the balloon into the air in response, while saying a word that rhymes with the word you said. It doesn’t have to be a real word, it just has to rhyme. As they get better at the game you can hit the balloon again, returning it to them while saying another word that rhymes with the first two.

See how long you can go until someone makes a mistake. It won’t hurt to let them win every now and then.

If you see they are having trouble with the game, you can begin by hitting the balloon higher into the air initially, giving them more time to think of a response.