Blowing Down Sight Words {Get Ready for K Through Play}

This week for the Get Ready for K Through Play Series we are talking about books, reading, and literacy.

We do a lot of reading and book related crafts and activities at our house to get my kids excited about reading. We also have done tons of alphabet and word family activities to help my five year old son start putting letters and sounds together to make words.

Now that my son is beginning to sound out words more and more, I've started introducing him to sight words.

Sight words are words that kids are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode. Here is one sight word list that I use (from Lakeshore).

We like to make learning sight words fun, so this week I am sharing a simple sight word activity we did with party blowers! (we've done this before with playdough containers as well) Scroll down for the toddler alphabet version too.

Here's what you'll need: blocks (we used our Melissa & Doug Deluxe Jumbo Cardboard Blocks), painters tape (don't use regular tape), paper strips, markers, and a party blower.

Here's how we did this activity...

First we cut out paper strips and wrote basic sight words on them.

Then we taped the strips to our jumbo blocks and then we stacked them up!

Once our towers were super tall, my son used his party blower and read each sight word as he blew each block down. Some were easy to blow down and some required more work. It was pretty funny to watch.

This was a pretty intense activity for the muscles in his mouth. It was loads of fun to do again and again... especially when the blocks would fall and crash loudly. 🙂

For my toddler we made a basic blowing down alphabet letters game. She and I worked together to build her towers and then she knocked them down with the party blower. I balanced the letters a little more precariously so that they fell down with a little less effort.