Elementary Kindergarten
Digital ActivitiesLanguage Arts
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If you’ve ever taught a kindergartner to read, then you know just how important sight words are.
These basic words occur so frequently in our reading that not knowing them causes a lot of unnecessary frustration.
But while they may seem simple enough to those of us doing the teaching, the truth is that many kids struggle with them.
Since they don’t always follow the phonetic spelling rules that make it possible for kids to sound them out, it can be really difficult for kids to remember them.
Fortunately, they’re really easy to practice and we’ve got a ton of fun ideas here on our site to get you started, the latest of which is this digital gumball matching activity that will have your students practicing 30 different sight words!
Practicing Sight Words
Teaching and practicing sight words can be super simple!
You don’t need a bunch of fancy supplies or to spend hours prepping materials (unless you want to)!
You don’t need thousands of flashcards or to spend hours drilling your students using them! Who wants to do that anyway?
No, you just need a few fun activities that really engage your students. Activities that are actually fun!
And this digital gumball matching activity fits that bill perfectly!
Digital Sight Word Gumball Matching
Put just about any kid on a computer or a tablet and they almost instantly become more engaged.
Now, that’s not to say that everything they do should be screen-related, but for particularly tricky concepts that they may be struggling with, it can definitely help!
This digital gumball matching activity, for example, allows those students that are struggling with remembering those sight words to see the words right there on the screen in front of them.
They can practice reading the sight word found on each of the gumball machines, but then they’ll need to look through each of the gumballs themselves to find the matching ones before dragging them over to the machine.
And this activity is available on all of the platforms that your students are already used to – Boom Learning, Google Slides, and Seesaw!
As they work their way through the activity, they’ll practice 30 different sight words from the Dolch primer list!
They’ll find a number of sight words on the individual gumballs and their job will be to match the correct ones by dragging them to the gumball machine.
By the time they’re done, they’ll have some seriously sweet sight word practice under their belts and will be a lot more confident in their own reading abilities!
