Teaching Reading with Sight Word Games, Activities and Worksheets

The foundation of any reading program is phonics. Right? Ha! This is an age-old debate, and lots of people fall in the “phonics is the only way” camp.

I used to be that way, until I had a child with dyslexia. Phonics didn’t work for her. What finally worked was a combination of reading instruction methods with a strong emphasis on Sight Words and Word Recognition. Most dyslexics take pictures of the whole word and store those pictures in their brain to figure out this thing called reading, and Anna was no exception. Phonics by itself was like a great big riddle she couldn’t solve.

Nowadays, I take a more balanced approach when teaching reading. We combine a traditional approach to phonics with an additional emphasis on learning words “on sight” through sight word games, sight word worksheets, and sight word activities. We focus more on whichever method is working for each child – on an individual basis.

Teaching your child to read is all about figuring out what is going to work best for them.

Online Sight Word Games

The year Anna finally learned to read, we were blessed to be reviewing three different online reading programs and each was instrumental in her final blaze of progress. I highly recommend these four online sight word games and each teaches from a different angle so you might want to get a trial of each. We are using the fourth program now to learn spelling and grammar.

Reading Eggs (Read my review of Reading Eggs here.)

Reading Kingdom (Read my review of Reading Kingdom here.)

Samson’s Classroom (Read my review of Samson’s Classroom here.)

Reading Horizons