Sight Word Games for Children

Learning sight words is one of the first steps that a child needs to take on their learning to read journey. Sight word games are one of the most effective ways to teach children how to automatically identify these words, making learning fun and motivational, and therefore all the more effective.

What are Sight Words?

Sight words are words like ‘it’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘is’ etc that appear frequently in early level texts. These words do not have a concrete image that accompanies them, and are highly dependent upon the context in which they are read, therefore they need to be learnt ‘at sight.’ There are approximately 100 sight words that make up more than fifty per cent of most early reading texts. The main features of sight words to remember include:

• Appear often in a text, especially those read by early readers.

• Are often difficult to spell as many are phonetically irregular. That is, their sound does not consistently match up to their letters.

• Are mostly adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and the most common verbs.

• Are not easily represented by pictures, for example, ‘the’ and ‘or.’

Sight Word Games in Reading Eggs

Reading Eggs recognises the important link between children learning sight words and becoming fluent and efficient readers. Many of the instructional activities within the Reading Eggs programme aim to develop a child’s bank of known sight words so that they can automatically recall them at sight. The sight words that children learn in Reading Eggs lessons feature in the story books and non-fiction titles, helping them to apply their knowledge to the actual act of reading.

The highly engaging, interactive and motivational word games and activities that feature in Reading Eggs lessons provide the perfect way for children to build their vocabulary of critical sight words. At the end of each Reading Eggs lesson, children are asked to read an ebook, allowing them to apply their knowledge of sight words to meaningful text.