Make Your Own: sight word practice cards

This idea hatched from numerous other ideas put together.  As you know, I am a tad obsessed with using contact paper and glass frames as dry erase boards.  Also, every week at school Gabe is given a list of sight words for him to write on a flash card and to practice writing and reading.  I decided to combine the two ideas and make sight word practice cards that he can write on.

I took the wide lined paper (the one with a solid line on top and bottom and the dotted line in the middle) you can get for kids to learn to write with and wrote out the Kindergarten and half of the First Grade sight word list (list is included below).  Then I cut them out, making sure to leave an extra line of space below the word I wrote (so Gabe had a space to copy it).  The hardest part was covering the whole thing (front and back) in contact paper and leaving enough room around the edges so the contact paper would adhere to itself and create a seal.

From there, the cards are done!  Gabe can take a dry erase marker and pull out a card (I store them in an empty oatmeal container) and practice sounding out the sight word and then spelling it out below the word that is already written.  Once he has them "memorized", I will read the sight word to him and he sounds it out for himself and writes the word on the back of the paper.  When he is done, he flips the card over to see if he spelled it correctly.

This is one of the easiest projects I have done and is more time consuming (all the 'laminating' of the words) than anything.

The link below is to PDF files you can download that have the 1000 most frequently used words in the English language.  I only made flashcards for the first fifty for Gabe.  This is just a good resource to have in general and the website itself (www.k12reader.com) is a good source of information and education to help make sure your child is on track.  There are lots of printables and free worksheets too!

Fry Word List - 1000 high frequency words