When you want to teach your child to read sight words are only one small part of the reading equation.  If you are teaching reading and you are doing it in a truly comprehensive manner then teaching phonics will probably be the main part of your reading program. However, there are a number of words that cannot be taught phonetically and they are considered the group of words that need to be memorized by the children. They are short, very common words and in order for the children to learn them there are many sight words games you can use to help them memorize them. There are 220 sight words and you can download this dolch sight words list for free.

You may see sites listing kindergarten sight words games, Dolch sight words games, and first grade sight words games. They are all one and the same, the basic Dolch sight words list. Once you have the list you can use it to start doing sight words games with your child or students. It is recommended to work on only about 10 words at a time. I am going to give you some tips in helping the children remember the sight words and will then give you some sight words games to do with the words. I am also going to give you a list of sites that have online sight words games when your child wants to practice at the computer.

It is not a good idea to have your child only use the online sites to practice their sight words. Children need lots of variety and in general kids spend too much time at the computer and in front of video screens. You will need to vary the games and activities they do to learn their sight words so they won’t get bored too easily.

Teaching sight words needs lots of repetition

The variety of sight words games materials

There are many various materials you can use to teach children their sight words. The first you need to do is to give the children a few tips on how to remember their sight words. they need to look to the beginning of the letter and ask them themselves three questions before attempting to read the words.

1. Can I sound out the word or even just part of it?
2. Is the word in a word family like: come/some or where/there or could/ should
3. Can I find a little word inside a big one like an, in animal or in, in inside

If they can’t do any of those then its just one of those words that they have to memorize. One of the ways of memorization is for them to remember the configuration of the the words. There are flash cards that have sight words on them, there are sight words worksheets and then there are a host of games that you can play with the sight words flashcard. It’s actually a good idea to have to sets of cards for some of the games.

Sight words flashcard games

1. One great game is the simple memory game. For this game you will most definitely need 2 sets of cards and the children will probably be very familiar with the memory games from their reading readiness activities they have done in the past. It is important to only use about 10 cards at a time so the children don’t get overwhelmed.
2. Tape  a number of words to the wall call out a word at a time and have the child point to which word it is
3. Put 10 cards face down, have the child pick up random cards and read each one. As they read it successfully have them put them into an envelope. If they don’t read it successfully then put it down again after going over the word with the child. When they get it the next time around they can then put it into their envelope.
4. Every day that they collect more cards in their envelopes let them read out what the words say in their envelopes.
5. Put the cards in rows and have them read rows up and down and then across.
6. Write the words one at a time on a white board, let them read it and then make a picture out of the word.
7. Wordo- This game is played like bingo but, instead of using the number on the card you use the sight words.
8. go fish- that is very much like memory and you need to sets of cards to play this
9. Magnets. Using the magnetic boards and alphabet magnets, you say the word and have the child spell it out on the board.

Sight words worksheets

If you are looking for free sight words worksheets, then I found the prefect sight for you. Many of the sights just don’t seem to have easily down loadable worksheets but this site of worksheets  fit the bill perfectly. Just remember that the worksheets should be used sparingly and should only be used as extra practice and as variety between the flashcards, workbooks and online games.

Sight words games online

A great way for your child to get some practice with his or her sight words is to go to some of the sites that have games that the very easy and the children can play them themselves with almost no adults input. Sometimes you may have to start them off but, most of them are self explanatory. I have listed a few sites below that have sight words games on them.

http://www.mrcpl.org/literacy/lessons/sight/index.html

http://www.dolchword.net/dolch-pre-primer-memory-game-1.html

http://www.starfall.com/n/matching/sight-words/play.htm?f

http://www.netrover.com/~crose/dolch/dolch.htm

I’m sure you can find many more if you do a search yourself online.

How to teach phonics

There are many different scenarios where phonics is taught. There is teaching phonics to preschoolers and kindergarten where it is really more of a pre reading exercise as most schools in the United States officially teach phonics in first grade. There are phonics teaching strategies that can be used with preschool and kindergarten without having to do a full blown phonics and reading curriculum. There are esl students that learn phonics and believe it or not there are adults who never learned to read here in America and there are very probably different ways how to teach phonics to adults that I am not going to cover here. Those teachers who teach adults to read may use the same methods as teaching phonics to preschoolers but, as I have no experience with that I will not address it.

There are many books, programs and games that will help you in a structured way some a little bit different from others on how to teach phonics. I am going to give you some lesson plans that you can use to begin and you can fill in with any number of the well known programs that are out there. I am also a big believer that teaching children to read does not only include phonics. There should be lots of reading readiness, sight words games. language activities for preschoolers and of course learning the alphabet in conjunction with learning phonics.

Phonics programs need to be easy to follow and very appealing to the children. Direct interaction is a must so even if you are using one of those online, or non personal programs then you need to be directly involved. At the same time that you are teaching phonics you should also be immersing the children in great literature. If all they learn to do is decode than the children may end up with reading comprehension issue. The more reading they are exposed to while you are teaching the phonics, the more relevance it will have.

Strategies for teaching phonics

There are a couple of basic points before we dive into the step by step of teaching phonics. Before the actual formal teaching of phonics the children should already be getting lots of exposure to connecting sound with letters. We don’t start teaching the name of the letters first and when we introduce the letters with the sounds we always introduce the lower case first. You should not introduce the capital letters until they know the lower case very well. When doing vowels we also teach short vowels before the long vowels and be very wary of worksheets that ask kids to recognize long vowels before the short ones.

A good way to learn the vowels is by turning them into characters like the  great resource called Zoo-Phonics Language Arts Resource Manual: Using the Wild to Teach the Childor theVowel Readers (Letterland Readers)

When you are teaching letter names which for the most part lots of children just learn from Sesame Street, the best capitals to start with is to teach the ones that look the most like their lower case partners.

Teaching phonics to preschoolers

It is extremely important when you are teaching phonics to preschoolers or kindergarten age children whether they are in a school setting or a home setting  2 parts of reading readiness skills are vital. Though there are many as I discuss in my post on reading readiness, auditory discrimination and visual discrimination must be dealt with in a very thorough manner. With visual discrimination the children must get proficient at spotting differences and you need  to play lots of games to train the children with this. You can use worksheets to supplement the games but, don’t rely only on worksheets.

In preschool and kindergarten there is not the same pressure to get children through a certain amount of books and workbooks so you can have the luxury of spending more time on these skills. Auditory discrimination is the second skills that must be worked on. The children not only have to hear the initial consonant sound but, they must hear sounds indie words and they must be able to blend two letters. You can play games with the kids like have them listen to words and see which are the same. you can do it with initial consonants and with blends.

There are many board games that help with blending as there are flashcards and workbooks as well. A combination of all three is best. Then there ar blends on the ends like mp, ng and ct. there are 4 special sounds that they will have to listen for as well, These 4 sounds are ch,sh,ph and th (don’t bother with wh at this point)

As a teacher teaching children phonics you must speak and articulate clearly. A child can 60 to be 6D and you must make sure that they are hearing clearly what you are saying.

If the child has a mild speech impediment that shouldn’t really impede his reading but a critical age for a lisp is 7 and you should be taking him or her for speech therapy as soon as you can.

Teaching phonics lesson plans

I can’t really give you a years worth of lesson plans here to teach phonics but, what I can give you is the basic order that phonics is usually taught along with some rules. you will have to use many materials to supplement this post and cannot expect as I’m sure you don’t to get a complete set of lesson plan in one post on how to teach phonics.I am not going to include in the steps, the pre reading and reading activities that have to do with immersion in reading and literature or about the reading readiness skills that you have to work on.

1. Start with initial consonant sounds-Every letter has a sound and let’s find objects that start with this sound and show them with letter it is that makes that sound.
2. Letter blends-sometimes there are two letters at the beginning of a word and lets find objects and words that have blends at the beginning.
3. The four special blends-ch,sh,ph,th
4. Word families- there are words that are all the same except for the first or first two letters. Begin with the at family. They will see when they add a c, p f or other letters to the family the word changes.
5. Begin vowels with the short e, i and o words. Olive, ostrich, add, if, exit,ebay etc
6. You can then merge words and can use flashcards to build the works.
7. The short u. They must know the other vowels very well before learning u-sub, bun,cut
8. Sight words- There are some words that defy logic and cannot be sounded out. These are sight words that the children will have to memorize. There are loads of games that help them with this. A particularity good one is called Easy Sight Words Set 2, PreK-2 (Phonics Flash Cards)
9. Begin the children on early reading books called starting to read books. There are many of these. Below are links to a number of the well known series. when you use some of those books to practice reading with your children then they will sequentially be taking them through all of the sounds they need to learn in the correct order.

New Scholastic Books Trade Bob Set 1 Beginning Readers Affordable Practical Best Seller
More Primary Phonics Storybook Set 1
Off to School (Read With Ladybird)

Two fun phonics rules

There are two fun and easy rules in phonics that are often used to make some difficult concepts easy. the first one is called the bossy e rule. this rule is for long vowel sounds. The bossy e sits on the end of words and makes the earlier vowel say its long sound. The e makes no sound at all its just  silent bully. One example would be fame or tile.

The second rule is when 2 vowels go walking the first one does the talking. Examples of these are jail, creeek and boat.

The y: The y is a tricky letter and they need to know that if comes at the beginning of the workd then its a straightforward sound like yams. but if its in the middle or the end, it gets trickier.

There are also  endings, suffixes, and silent letters and syllables and as we spoke many word families to practice with.

Just remember than reading is more than phonics and sounding out words. It is a combination of the whole bunch of activities I talked about in the beginning of this post. If you do them all together and have lots of patience then your children will be sure to be successful readers.

How to decide on the decorating motif for the child’s bedroom

If you are the creative type than decorating your child’s bedroom should make you very excited as you have the whole room as your canvas. If you are expecting a baby and looking for baby room ideas you may be wanting to prepare the room well in advance of the birth of your baby. You don’t want to be climbing ladders and scraping paint off the walls in your ninth month. If the kids bedroom you are looking to decorate is a tween or a teenager then you will approach it in a completely different way. Baby room ideas for girls and boys bedroom ideas are also vastly different from each other.

The age of the child will  have a  lot to do with this one. If it is for a baby then you and your spouse will have full control over how to decorate. If it for an older child then they will definitely have lots to say in this matter. You first have to decide if you are going to be redoing the whole entire room or just adding some carpet, furniture and some accessories.

Using themes for kids bedroom ideas

If you are going to be starting from scratch the first thing you need to decide if you are going to decorate in a theme style. For boys bedrooms some of the themes may be sports, animal themes, , outer space themes ships and boats or maybe some adventure Disney theme. Girls of course, will go for very different types of themes. Princess themes, flowers, hearts and lots of girly Disney themes like The  Little Mermaid are very popular with little girls. Another movie icon that little girls love, Hannah Montana, like the Hannah Montana games are all  very feminine themes. It is also very easy to find linen sets to match the themes you have chosen.

If you are nervous about finding the right linen set to match, then buy the linen first and then work the rest of the room around the linen set.

Non themed kids bedroom ideas

If you don’t want to do a specific theme you may just want to go with a color motif. Once you pick one, tow or three colors then you can mix and match accessories to go with the colors you have decided to use. There are some very cute things you can do in a room that are very decorative but, not theme based.

• Use paint in two contrasting bright colors. You can also add tape to different parts of the room to make straight lines across the room. this adds lots of interest.
• Use borders. The decorating stores sell these borders that can go all along the top of the room or even down in the lower third of the wall.
• Write words on the walls. Find a cute saying and either get lettering you can paste on or use a stencil to write across the wall. you can even add a picture to the saying.
• Make a mural on the wall. you don’t even need a real decorator for this. You can get a picture yo like and a transparency machine and project it on your wall. Then sketch what is on the wall and paint it.

Whatever you end up suing to decorate your child’s walls, just remember that kids bedroom ideas are not set in stone and you can always redo the room as they grow and their tastes change.

It helps to keep all those little balls, blocks and small stuff animals off the floor. So far it seems pretty durable. If you attach the anchor strap to the wall the kids can tug and lean on the shelf with no problems. Removing the  boxes from the second and third shelves are harder for the kids than the one on top

This organizer is perfect for smaller toys you need to separate. Larger toys don’t fit so well due to the small space between the top and bottom of the bins. It’s very sturdy only if you put it together right. I can easily see how people think it’s not sturdy but they just did not put it together properly. Aside from being slightly annoyed at having to pay >$50 for a toy organizer, this product is excellent and now that I have it, I think is worth the money. It is sturdy and well built. The rods are metal, but you’d never know it unless you put it together since they match the wood color. My son loves it and it’s easy to keep clean. Stores a large amount of different sized toys and the bins are easy to keep clean.  Before this, we had been using a toy chest. They are great when the toys are big and baby-ish, but now my kids (boy 5YO and girl 3YO) are getting smaller things that could get lost or damaged in the chest. Not to mention, every time they wanted a certain toy, everything had to come out, and rarely got put back. So after Christmas, as I was cleaning up, I decided to start looking for something better.. Everything gets played with more too. The “play area” looks cleaned up.I had nothing come damaged like others have said. I have the Primary colored one since it does sit in my living room for now.

This toy chest is awesome! It will be great for when my baby starts digging in the toy chest herself and doesn’t slam her fingers in it.If you put anything on top of the lid it collapses into the box. I also may add a piece of velcro to secure the lid to see if that helps. But, overall, we love it.It not only matches the colors in his room and looks adorable but it’s pretty large and fits ALOT more stuff than I imagined! I especially love that it is flexible and forgiving and that it folds flat when not in use although It’s also REALLY easy to move around from room to room as I would imagine a heavy wooden one would NOT be! I love this toy box my toddler son can easily get in and out of it. I like that fingers, hands & Heads cannot get smashed in it.

The sleek dark wood finish makes it more of a piece of furniture than just a place to store toys. It was easy to assemble and the colorful cloth bins (which are included)are adorable and fit nicely into the cubby holes. My only criticism would be that the cubby holes are not deep enough. If it would be a little deeper, I could store some bigger toys in there. Overall, it is well worth the money and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to organize but also wants the room to look beautiful!

After the easy assembly, we tested the piece and there was no wobble. The baskets are well constructed and just the right size for a young child. Surprisingly, they hold quite a bit. Any larger and the contents could overwhelm a toddler. You really do no want a child pulling out a large basket full of toys off a shelf. The height is optimal for small children. They can reach all the baskets as well as whatever you place on top of the unit without much trouble. Lastly, the colorful baskets make the unit a bright spot in the bedroom. All in all, the storage cabinet makes the room look tied together because it matches the rest of our furniture.

Love, Love, Love these storage bins. I bought 4 (have only received 3 so far). I had all 3 put together in less than an hour. Very easy to assemble and light weight enough to carry up the stairs. My daughter loves them too. Awesome find, especially with free shipping.So a friend of mine has these and I fell in love with them and decided to order a couple. They are similar to those from land of nod. So I got them and they weren’t exactly what I had anticipated which I could deal with, however the way the screws are set up, you can see them all over and it just looks really bad. I need to go and pick up those screw cover stickers and hope my son doesn’t pick them off and eat them. I would say, they work for what they are but spend the extra 15-20 bucks and pick up the nicer ones. Aside from that, they were easy to put together and they are very sturdy.

Playing games alone is no fun, unless you’re a hermit. Since game playing for centuries has been more or less the job of children and children are social beings it’s alway been more fun when playing to play 2 player games.

Throughout history you couldn’t even call it a game if it was alone, until solitaire came out as it was played by a solitaire person. When computer came out many people found that they did not need others to play games and games became much more of a solitaire pastime. Children though always did better with others and still do.

As people got bored of gaming alone and computers got more sophisticated, programmers discovered that it was more profitable to create games that could be played by 2 people.

Offline there are still many types of  the old standby 2 player games . There are of course the numerous card games for kids that can be played by 2 or more children, like go fish, cribbage, speed and one of my children’s favorites, spit.

The board games of yesteryear were games that allowed families to have lots of quality family time and it is a little bit sad that many of these games have migrated to become 2 player board games online. You can now play an online version of monopoly, chess, tic tac toe and backgammon.

One of the benefits of being able to play these old board games online is that children that live in other parts of the world can get together on the social media site, Facebook and play them together. Otherwise the online games have to be played together at one computer.

Girls have a tendency to love like Hannah Montana games while you will find the boys more interested in 2 player car racing games. Young children are usually drawing to sponge bob games which is a takeoff on the popular cartoon character from the T.V show who lives under the sea with other sea creatures. Interestingly enough sponge-bob games are not only for young children but there are bowling and shuffleboard games that are played by adults as well.

The sponge bob games are already used in a variety of gaming platforms like game boy advance, PS2, xbox and Nintendo game cube.

The main problem with these 2 player online games is that keep the children tied to their computers and away from the fresh air and exercise they so badly need.

So make sure that if you allowing your children to get involved in all kinds of computer video games, they don’t get too addicted and make sure they get plenty of exercise in between games.

A bride that is preparing for her wedding has a lot on her mind. Shes’ been preparing for months and of course, the little girls who will be her flower girls are very much part of the preparations. They need their flower girl dresses, they need to practice with the rest of the wedding party at the rehearsal and you then have to decide if you need to get flower girl gifts for them.

The gifts will depend on the age of the children and what others in your circles have done before. Many  little girls are so excited to be the flower girls that they will not expect any kind of gift at all. However, if it is an accepted thing to do than you may have to add thinking of  what  flower girl gifts to get to your list of things  to do. If you have  a ring bearer you may need more than one gift and may really need to look at some cheap flower girl and ring bearer gifts.

The truth is that even if you do decide that you need to give flower girl gifts you don’t have to break the bank, and can get away with some very cute and inexpensive gifts. If you are in a more upper class wedding party then your gifts can, of course be more elaborate.

As the little flower girls usually use baskets for the flowers that they are going to throw, it is very common to give these little girls, baskets that may have different things inside of them. They may consist of edible gifts like chocolates and all kinds of candies, or there may be little dolls and toys inside. The baskets however, can be decorated with either beautiful satin or gauze materials to make them look especially beautiful. This makes it a personalized flower girl gift.

Make sure to add the right bows and ribbons and you will have one ecstatic little girl.

If you don’t want to go the basket route than you can buy them some pretty jewelery that they will wear at the wedding as an accessory to their flower girl dresses. You can then gift them with this jewelry at the end of the wedding. Depending on what you have in your budget will determine what type of jewelry you will purchase. Little earring studs, a pretty heart necklace or even a custom piece to match with their dress will be wonderful.

Another great idea if the baskets and jewelry area not what you want: Take a picture that the photographer took at the wedding of the flower girl, get a pretty little frame and put her picture in there to present to her.

If you really need help in making a decision you may just want to ask her Mom what she would like. Nobody knows little girls and the flower girl gift ideas  they would like better than their own mothers.