Y’all. Routines are magical.
They save time.
They lower stress.
They lower student time off task.
They minimize confusion.
They minimize the time taken to give directions.
They are simply a win. A magical win. And you need them in your classroom. FOR ALL THE THINGS.
Today, I’m sharing my sight word ROUTINES with you that I’ve used in my classroom for years.
This post is one in a series of THREE DRY ERASE BOARD POSTS! The other posts include:
DRY ERASE BOARD WORD WORK AND SIGHT WORD ROUTINES
DRY ERASE BOARD ENGAGING ACTIVITIES FOR LITTLE LEARNERS
please note: this post includes some affiliate links!
These sight word routines can truly be used with any words – sight words, frye words, vocabulary words, etc! I use them as a 10 minute per day sight word lesson!
Day 1:
Each Monday, I explicitly teach the sight words and their patterns to the kiddos. We discuss if the word has r controlled vowels, doubled consonants, magic e, vowel teams, blends, digraphs, etc! I post the words on my focus wall each week for the kiddos to see and work with all week long as we go through these daily routines.
Still on day one, as I teach the patterns in each word, we then write the word on our white boards- one word at a time. **Please note, these routines are where I am explicitly teaching these WORDS. Later in the day – during reading and writing – the kiddos will see, use, read, and write these words in a variety of texts!
Day 2:
On day 2 – we warm up with a quick “say it, spell it, say it” chant of the list of our sight words and quickly review the word patterns and parts of each word.
The way I use “Say it, spell it, say it” in my classroom is modeled in the short video below!
Then we dive into some sentence dictation. I will say the sentence using the sight word and the kiddos will repeat the sentence orally with me. We use whole brain teaching movements to remember where our capital letters and punctuation go! Then each kiddo writes those sentences on their white boards.
As the year goes, I have the kiddos give me these sentences that we use for dictation, but for the beginning of the year, I give them the sentences that include mostly words that they can spell or at least phonetically figure out!
Day 3:
Day 3 of our sight word routines is when we permanently add these sight words to our mental and tangible word walls! I don’t have a bulletin board style word wall in my classroom, but we do have these mini word walls that we use to find and highlight our words each week. If you have a traditional bulletin board style word wall in your classroom, day 3 is when I might add those words to your classroom word wall for the kids to refer to!
We HIGHLIGHT our words in our word wall books on day 3. The kids get practice finding words in alphabetical order as well as permanently mark those words in our word wall books so they can then easily find and refer to the sight words that we’ve already learned as the weeks move forward and we learn new words!
On day 4, we get our chant and cheers on! There are LOTS of adorable and ready to print chants on TPT, but I’ve had these faded, poorly printed, peeling laminate covered cheer cards for all 12 years of my teacher career and I can’t quite part with them yet for some reason!
The way I use the cheers is I will have one kiddo pick a number from 1-24 (the number of cheers I have), and then we will use the “say it spell it say it” method for each word but in the CHEER! So… say it, spell it, CHEER IT!
On day 5 of our sight word routines, we do a little sentence building activity that I call MYSTERY SENTENCES! Each kiddo will pick ANY word that they want from the sight word list. They will use that word in a sentence, though they will leave a blank where the word should be! I also enforce the kiddos’ sentences need to be “juicy” and full of context clues so that the classmate who is filling in the mystery sentences can figure out exactly what word belongs there! Then, the kiddos walk around the room to other students’ boards to fill in their mystery sentences. When their own sentence is filled in, they stop and check it, erase, write a NEW mystery sentence, and then jump back in to walking around the room to complete their classmates’ mystery sentences! You can add a twist or other directions to this like maybe they just trade their board with a neighbor instead of getting up or they might find a quiet spot in the room with a small group for a few minutes of mystery sentences, etc. Make it work for you and your students!
Then, come Monday, we start all over again with a new list of sight words!
As you noticed, nearly all of these daily sight word routines of ours include our dry erase boards and EXPO MARKERS! We go through a LOT of EXPO MARKERS every school year, but I’m SO excited that EXPO now has BRAND NEW INK INDICATOR MARKERS so you can actually SEE where the ink level on the markers is! No more guessing and hoping about when it will and won’t run out of ink!! So my kids will be SET when we are ready to squeeze in our quick, ten minute, sight word lesson or activity each day!
So my kids will be SET when we are ready to squeeze in our quick, ten minute, sight word lesson or activity each day!
These INK INDICATOR EXPO MARKERS are now available in six different colors that you can see below! What color do you think your kiddos would love the best? Black, red, blue, purple, light green, or dark green?!
I would love to hear what your daily sight word practice looks like?! Are you a classroom like ours that uses EXPO MARKERS FOR ALL THE THINGS?! I’d love to hear what you do!
If you want to pin these ideas later, you can snag the image below!
Happy sight wording, friends!
A huge thanks goes out to EXPO for sponsoring this post! I received compensation and/or free product from EXPO for this post; However, the opinions in this post are 100% my own.
