Learning Sight Words with Letter Beads

Learning Sight Words with Letter Beads

A couple of weeks ago this little guy was home from school sick with a fever and cough for an entire week.  Every morning he rolled out of bed and looked miserable so I knew I couldn’t send him to school.  Since he was missing so much school I wanted to find a fun way for him to at least practice his sight words.  I had received a box of fun craft supplies from CraftProjectIdeas.com and inside were these fun letter beads and fuzzy sticks.  I figured that would be a fun way for him to work on learning sight words as well as developing his fine motor skills.

The only supplies you need for this activity are some letter beads and craft fuzzy sticks.  I poured the beads out onto our marker board just to contain them a bit and make it so he could spread them out to see the different letters.  Then he went down his list of sight words and tried to make as many of the words as he could find letters for.   He has passed off reading all of his words and is now working on spelling them so this was a great practice for that.

Once he had made a word, he threaded them onto the fuzzy sticks.  One thing I have found from raising boys is that they have a hard time with fine motor skills so this was a great way for him to practice.  My older two boys struggle with handwriting so I wish I would have done more activities like this with them when they were learning to write.

If we had even more beads we could have practiced making simple sentences and putting those together on the sticks.  There are a lot of variations you could do for different levels of understanding.  If children are just learning their letters you could use the beads just as a way of learning their alphabet.

Do you have a fun way of teaching your kids their sight words?  I’d love to hear it.  Leave a comment below with your great ideas.  I’m always looking for ways to make learning fun for my boys.