Sight Word Clouds

Squeals of delight filled our home while our kindergartener worked played with this delightful Sight Word Cloud activity. Not just from her as she squished her fingers into the clouds. But from all of her sisters who couldn’t resist watching in amazement.
I saw the idea on I Can Teach My Child when her picture popped up on Pinterest. She used the idea to review the alphabet.

Follow Life Over C’s’s board ABC the Alphabet for you and Me! on Pinterest.

We are a bit past letter recognition, so I immediately thought about using it for those pesky sight words. Jaida has been hard a work learning all of the first set of Fry’s sight words. She was having a really tough time until I discovered a fantastic resource from Brenda of Tejada’s Tots. The idea of mixing sight words with picture supported sentences sounded great.

And as she was working through the review cards last Friday I heard those three little words that every homeschooling mom and kindergarten teacher loves to hear. “I can read!”

Which of course was followed up in typical Jaida fashion with, “Well, not Ms. Frizzle because that’s for second-year kids and I’m only first-year.” lol!

(Here kindergarten is equal to an American preschool and formal schooling starts with first-year when the kids turn six.)

We had a blast with the shaving cream and glue clouds which Jenae gives a great tutorial of on her blog.

All you need is 4 parts shaving cream and 1 part white school glue. Scoop it into fluffy little piles on your paper and leave it to dry overnight.

I did the preparation while Jaida was in bed because I knew the anticipation would be too much!

For a while we used the picture-supported cards to tell her which words to find and then she couldn’t focus on the cards because she was so excited. Instead, I just told her the words to find.

We discovered that if you have two clouds that are stuck together, one of them will explode like a volcano.

She liked it so much that she wouldn’t throw it away when she was finished. I had to throw it away when she was sleeping. That’s a sign of a good activity!

I’d love to hear your out-of-the-box ideas for encouraging reading! Please share with us in the comments or leave a picture on my Facebook page.