School Readers!

Yay, so finally some good news from the school front. It turns out that C's teacher assessed C last week. I'm not sure exactly what areas they tested him, but she assured me that he did really well on everything they did with him. So after talking with the deputy principal, they are going to do some extension work with him at school.

One of the areas they assessed him in was his sight words. C has always been a bit hit and miss with sight words, sometimes he will see a word once and that's it, he has it, other times he can see it twenty times, including on consecutive pages of a book and still struggle with it. So I was quite shocked when she gave me a list of 20 words and said he only got four wrong. I was so proud of him! The test was for whether they would allow him to take home pre-primary readers, something we have asked about before as he has mastered all the level appropriate books we have in the house. He had to get 100% correct to be allowed to have them- the same rule applies for pre-primary students- so it is now a case of teaching him those four words so he can get the books.

In case you are interested, here is the list:
did                are             is                 I
the                can            get               look
like               at               in                 up
on                see             my               you
we                to              here             have

I don't know if this is a typical list, or if it is just created by his school.

So when I got home, I used some blank flash cards (click to download a blank flash card sheet) I had left over and wrote out all of the words.
I had already guessed the ones he didn't know but figured, the more practice the better. We played "Jumping Jack Flash". It is just a game where I lay the cards out on the floor- one to each tile, and C must jump on the tile with the correct word.

We also played a board game type activity where the cards are set out in a trail on the tiles, and used our over sized dice to move around the "board". The player must read the word correctly or they go back to their original space. I let N play this game too with a modified rule- he must tell me the beginning sound of the word.

They are just a couple of little ideas to make flash cards a little less boring. Having said that, we still do the occasional flash card session. They are very handy when in the car- while hubby is driving of course- and if you stick to less than 20 cards, they seldom get bored before you are finished. Oh, and remember to shuffle the cards every time so they do not learn the order of the words!

Hopefully, by this time next week we will have one of those little readers I remember loving as a child in his hot little hands!

Have fun and love to learn!