Sight Word Twister

One of the my primary focuses in my first grade tutoring group has been increasing their ability to recognize sight words. At least two to three times a week, we begin our session with a game of sight word slap. They have improved vastly and can read almost all of the words on the Dolch First Grade Vocabulary List. For one of their prize days recently, I decided to reward their efforts with a game of Sight Word Twister.  

My inspiration for this game came from Pinterest. I discovered a pin where one educator had written sight words onto the circles of a Twister mat and instead of calling out the colors for students to place their hands on, she would call out the sight words. I thought this was a great idea and decided to try it out for myself. 

For my students, I altered the rules of game somewhat. One of my first graders is wheelchair bound and I didn't want her to feel excluded from the group. Instead of having the students place their hands and feet on the mat, I had all of the children sit around the mat. One at a time, they were given a die to roll. The student would roll the die onto the mat and would have to read the word that the die landed on. I came prepared with a lot of sight word flashcards to place on top of the Twister circles. I did not write on actual mat itself because I wanted to be able to reuse the game in the future. Once a student successfully read a sight word, I replaced the flashcard with a new one. The game lasted the entire 30 minutes of our intervention. 

For the most part, my students enjoyed this game. If I play in the future, I would like to use a larger ball instead of die. The die was small and would frequently land on the white space of the mat. At that point, I would just choose a word for the student to read.  

From an educators stand point, it was a very successful game because my students were able to have fun while practicing their vocabulary skills for 30 minutes! 

Sight Word Twister