Today I am really excited to tell you about a great resource that we have been working on in the HeidiSongs office since August: our new Hidden Sight Word Coloring Worksheets! The idea for this has been bumping around in my brain for quite a while, but I never had time to do anything with it until the end of last summer when I finally created my first one for the word “the.”
I posted it on my HeidiSongs Facebook Page for some feedback, and then made a few changes and re-posted it. The response from everyone online at the time was extremely positive, and I have actually had quite a few inquiries from those teachers, wanting to know if I have finished them yet! And now, finally, the answer is YES, thanks to the hard work and creative skills of Krista in the HeidiSongs office, who completed the set of words from Sing & Spell Vol. 1 with my guidance. (No, I am NOT Superwoman and if I tried to do all of these myself they would NEVER get done!!!!!)
But back to the Hidden Sight Word Coloring Worksheets! After creating the first one, I attached it to a homework packet for my students once I had introduced our first sight word, “the.” When the children brought back their homework, I asked them to show me what they had done, and many of them were very excited about their papers, and were proudly showing them off! Since then, we have done a few more for homework, and a few in class. It seems that these worksheets are just the right amount of challenge for the children; they are not too hard and not too easy.
They can be done independently with most of them getting them right. They are almost self-checking, in that when the child is done, he sees that the word itself comes up. Of course, I’ve discovered that the brighter children in the class can tell what word is written in the middle of the design before I’ve even told them what word to look for, of course. But they don’t seem unhappy at all by this; in fact, they seem quite pleased with themselves!
In choosing the “distractor” words (the wrong answers) to go in the sections around the outside of the target word, we tried hard to choose words that would be very close visually so as to really make the kids think before coloring and be good for visual discrimination as well as reading. Another thing I like about it is that although there is one color designated for the target word, the instructions leave the rest of the coloring as “optional,” and allow the children to make them the color of their choice. My intention was to allow teachers to tell the class that they should either color it or not color it, at their discretion, based on their own classroom management needs and how much time they need to fill.
Children doing this at home for homework can then color the outside sections whether or not they wish to, and that is exactly what my students did, of course! Some of them really had fun with it and colored in everything with lots of bright colors, and others that don’t enjoy that sort of thing as much did the minimum. So it all worked out exactly as I wanted!
We are including a couple of them as freebies so that you can try them out and see if your students respond to them as well as mine did. I find them to be easy to use and very flexible as far as classroom management is concerned. I hope you enjoy using these as much as we are! The set of Hidden Sight Word Worksheets are for sale here. They include all of the words in Sing and Spell the Sight Words, Vol. 1. We’ll be making the worksheets for the remaining volumes of our Sight Word DVD’s ASAP.
**UPDATE! We now have these Hidden Sight Word worksheets available for ALL SIX sight word volumes!!!! As well as Hidden Alphabet, Hidden Numbers, Hidden Parts of Speech, and Hidden CVC Words Vol 1 and Vol 2!!
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Also, I would like to give a great big shout out and THANK YOU to the wonderful teachers of the Wisconsin Kindergarten Association for inviting me to come speak in their beautiful state! I had a great time meeting so many nice people and sharing my ideas, and they treated me like a queen. If you live anywhere nearby and are looking for a great conference to go to, consider WKA’s annual Kindergarten conference next year! They are trying to get the wonderful and fabulous Deanna Jump to come speak next year, although she is as yet unconfirmed. Don’t miss it!!!!
And now here I am in Dallas for the University of Dallas Catholic Ministry Conference! I will be flying home to Los Angeles, CA on Saturday morning. It was very exciting to be speaking to what may have been the largest audience EVER- nearly 250 people! I did three different sessions, and it was lots of fun! I do hope to be invited back next year! But WOW- am I exhausted! If you would like to see the handouts from those three sessions, you may download them here:
Bananas for Apps! – Great Ideas for Using the iPad® & iPod® in the Early Childhood Classroom
Favorite Multisensory Tips and Tricks For Teaching Phonemic Awareness and Sounding Out Words
Musical Math: Movement and Manipulatives
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