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More Dot Card Games

Visual Imprinting for Computation

The goal of these activities is for children to develop such a rich visual background for computation that they will “see” the answers in their heads in the form of visuals when confronted with abstract problems on a page. When playing the games, however, the process of laying a visual background is passive. The focus will be on the game, and during the game, visual images will be building in the child’s memory.

Introductory Game

Give the children blank squares of paper and a crayon or marker. Tell them you are going to play a different sort of memory game. You will show them a dot card, they will give it a good look, then you will hide the card and they will draw on a blank card what they remember seeing on your dot card.

Procedure

• Show the children a card.

• Let them take a good look at it, then put the card back into your stack.

• Ask the children to shut their eyes and “see” the card in their imagination. Can they see the pattern of dots? Great!

• Now ask them to open their eyes and draw the same pattern on a blank card.

• When they have completed this task, show them your card and compare yours to theirs.

Computation Imprinting

For these games it will be best to have two identical sets of cards – two copies of each dot pattern. 

Explore the dot patterns before you begin. Pay particular attention to how many different combinations of numbers that each number has. You can only make a three from 2+1. (We are ignoring 0 + the number for now). Four is made of two combinations of numbers, as is five. Six and seven have three possible number combinations, while 8 and 9 have four. Over time, the children will learn that if  you divide a number in half, it will have that same number of possible combinations. Odd numbers can be divided in half but will always have one extra “odd” number that cannot be paired up. I think  there is value in creating dot cards that have two colors like the ones in the illustrations. The color will help the children as they form visual memories. It is likely the children will forever more associate pink and blue with five, and orange and blue with four, however!

Go Fish

The first several times you play Go Fish, play it like you did before, using the total number of dots on the card when asking for a card. When the child has played this way a few times, switch. This time when you play Go Fish, instead of saying “Do you have a  5?” you will say, “Do you have a 1+4=5?” or “Do you have a 5+1=6.”

Memory

Similarly, when playing Memory, at first when you make pairs,  say the total number of dots on the  cards. After a few times playing that way, switch. Rather than calling out the total number, you will say, “6+1=7,” or “2+3=5.”

Next, we will explore ways to build visual memory for number relationships, so watch for that post next Tuesday! And by all means, have fun playing!

Games Using Math Dot Cards

Last week we made dot cards, and by now they are beautifully dry and ready to use.

Introducing the Games

My own preference when using math cards with beginners (four and five year olds) was to choose dot cards that only went up to 3. The instructions were that I would toss a card on the table and the children were to quickly say how many dots. The one rule was that they were not to count the dots, but just look and guess how many. If you have more than one child playing with you, let the kids take turns answering. Go through your stack a couple of times.

The next time you meet, add cards for number 4. Talk briefly about four and the dot arrangements on the four cards, and then shuffle the cards into the stack. Play the toss game again. Add another number each day until you have all the numbers to 10 in your stack. The following games should be modeled for the children first, and then they can play independently. If you are playing with one child, no problem!

Dot Card Flash

Pair up with your child or divide your group into pairs. One child will display a card and the partner will call out how many dots he sees. Remember, no counting allowed!

War

Again, this game is played in twos. Each player has a stack of dot cards held face-down. At the signal, “1-2-3-WAR!” players lay a card down, face up, saying the number of dots on their cards. The player who played the higher number gets both cards. The object of the game is to win all the cards.

War Variation

Before players lay down their cards, each says a number aloud. When cards are played, if that number shows up in the cards played, the person who chose that number takes the cards. If neither number shows up, cards go to the center pile. The next person to correctly call a number that is played gets all the cards in the center stack. For example, player 1 calls out “7” and player 2 says “5.” Both players lay down a dot card. The cards played are 3 and 4. Because the played cards do not match the numbers called, both cards go into the center pile and new numbers are called. The next time, player 1 calls out “8” and player 2 calls out “5,” and then both players lay down a card. Cards played are 5 and 7. Player 2 gets both cards. If by chance both players call numbers that match the played cards, each player gets the card she called.

Go Fish

You will need two sets of dot cards for this game. Shuffle the stacks and deal five cards to each player. The player who goes first will look at the dot cards in his hand and will ask the second player for a card to match one he is holding. For instance, if player 1 is to go first and she has dot cards 3, 7, 1, and 9, she will ask player 2 for one of those cards. If player 2 has one, he must surrender that card to player 1 who will place the matching cards face down beside her. Player 2 then asks for a card. If the requested card is not in his partner’s hand, she will say, “go fish” and the requesting player will draw a new card from the center stack. The game ends when the one player is out of cards. The player holding the highest number of pairs wins the game.

Follow Up

After your child has become very familiar with the dot patterns on the cards and has mastered the ability to name the numbers without counting the dots, it will be time to utilize her visual number sense in computation. Check back on Thursday for a new post about visual imprinting for computation. If you missed last Thursday's post about creating the dot cards, click here.

Making Multisensory Math Materials

In my October 22 post, I said the following, and now I want to jazz it up!

For the visual & tactile learner, use dot cards to practice learning how many each number is. For instance, if you steer a child away from counting up to add, she will begin to rely on her strong  visual sense to understand the “how many” of each number as well as to learn the combinations of numbers that equal each target number. These dot cards show various ways to arrange five dots so that not only will a child have practice just glancing and guessing “how many,” but also a strongly visual learner will begin to absorb that 5 can be made of different combinations of numbers. If you encourage your child to rely on her visual strengths, she will be much farther ahead than if you sit her down to do math the old way, which is to count up, count on her fingers, or just write the answers to problems written on paper. SO BO-ring! I call the practice of learning via images, Visual Imprinting.

Visual Imprinting Sets the Background for Success in Math

Our goal in visual imprinting activities is to connect abstract concepts to a visual image that is meaningful to your child. Visual imprinting just happens; it is a subconscious form of learning. You could call it “learning through the back door.” Visual imprinting occurs any time we see a complete picture or a specific part of a picture in our minds. Even though the idea of visual imprinting is elusive and hard to describe, we can deliberately take advantage of it in our teaching. If we can embed concepts we want a child to learn within a visual or a pattern, learning will happen unconsciously.

There are many methods out there for bringing kids up to speed in computation, but the most fun and the most effortless involve visual games. Let’s make some dot cards, making that process into a craft, and then play games with the cards. If your child is having fun, he will not even know he’s learning!

Making Math [dot cards] – A Multisensory Activity

• The first thing you will need is a small stack of sturdy, square blank cards. Ideally they would be between 3½ and 4 inches on a side. Make them bigger if you’d like to.

• Tempera paint in bright colors

• Wet sponge on a plate

• Paper towels

• Old newspapers

• A place to let the cards dry

Making the dot cards

1. Start with one number first – say the number 3.

2. Make several dot cards using a variety of arrangements and color combinations.

3. The child will dip her fingertip into the paint and then press her fingertip carefully onto the card, making sure to only make the number of dots you planned to make.

4. First card can have dots of the same color.

5. Second card could have one dot the same as the first card, but then the remaining two dots in a new color.

6. Name your cards according to what the pattern reminds you of. See examples below.

The first card just has three red dots. The second card has one red and two blue. It reminds me of a bear face. The bear has a red nose and blue eyes! In the third card, the bear is looking over his shoulder to see who is behind him. The third card can be a slide or stepping stones in the garden, or whatever else you fancy. Even if you do not stress that 3 red dots and zero other dots makes three, or that two blue dots plus one red dot make three, the child is storing up the visuals in his mind to serve as a reference point later. In addition to the visual, the child is feeling the squishy paint, smelling the tart aroma, and is seeing the color on his fingertips. It would be a powerful multisensory experience if you had your child dip three fingertips at one time in the paint because he would feel the three, see the three fingertips coated in paint, and then he’d feel and see himself transferring the color from his fingertips to the card stock.

Making More Patterns

When you make dot cards for fours, play with the arrangement of dots. The first card reminds me of a child sitting down reading a blue book. The third card looks so much like a footprint to me. The middle card could be anything. To me, it looks like sets of twins walking, as viewed by a bird flying over their heads.

Note that I have shown 3+1, 2+2, and 1+3. Use the first and last dot cards to explore the fact that no matter how you arrange the dots, 3 dots and 1 dot will always equal four.

One more set

Fives are fun. Card one is a box with a blue belly button. Card two can either be a house, or a sitting bear with blue shoes. Card three could be a baby chair with pink feet. Note that in my cards, I’ve covered both combinations of numbers that equal five. Once again, two cards show the same combination of numbers (3+2 and 2+3), both equaling 5.

When you have made your dot cards through the number 10, lay them out in a safe place to dry. Check back here on Tuesday for games to play with your dot cards! In the meantime, have fun creating!

When A Picture is Worth 1000 Words

One glance at this photo and words become unnecessary. Such is the power of an image. Artists and marketers alike understand the power of images to communicate, to convince, and to sway. Images are powerful because meaning is conveyed in one instant, the image is stored in the brain, and when the image evokes emotion in the viewer, the message becomes unforgettable.

The hard, the dry, and the boring

What if we took all that is hard, boring, and dry in education and used images to teach it? Wouldn’t that be amazing? For sure, our young learners would be much happier and more successful. Learning would no longer feel like learning; it would be more like absorbing ideas from the environment.

I remember some ideas that were hard for my young students to just remember. You know these concepts as well! Reversals are some of the most common difficulties for beginners. We show our students a symbol and tell them the name of it and expect (and need?) them to remember both for the next time it comes up.

Those confusing symbols

These symbols represent only a handful of those that are problematic for young people. Verbally telling a child how to correct the number or letter just doesn’t help. Next time they need to write that symbol, there is nothing to remind them of how to do it correctly. An image can be your biggest ally in times such as these. Something concrete and familiar to the child can also be a great tool to use…such as the child’s own hands.

Strategies

A visual and tactile cue for forming an S properly involves a tiny story, a hand cue and voila, the tricky S is done! Story? Make a cave with your left hand. Start with your pencil at the end of your pointer finger and trace the cave and then your thumb below the cave.

For lefties, have them use their right hand pointer finger (cave-seeking bear) and point into the cave. They will trace around the pointer finger tip and then curve around the other way to make “stacked caves.” Apartment caves for bears anyone?

Group similar symbols together for ease of learning

Let’s ease learning hard concepts by grouping like things together, rather than teaching in isolation. Here we see some “cave letters” that can be taught all together. The cave is made as in the S example above, then each of the letters are formed from inside that cave. Lefties would substitute the bear pointer finger that is going into his cave. These helps are all available in our Writing the Visual, Kinesthetic, Auditory Alphabet.

Include a jingle

When working through refining the difference between b and d, use the jingle “B’s like to walk, while D’s like to talk.” Then display the visual for reference. I actually had my students act out being b and d. We lined up and all the little “b’s” who were ready to walk faced to the right. Then we’d insert a few talkative “d’s” who of course were facing the wrong way (face to the left) and chat about how those “d’s” might bump into walls or crash into the person behind them because they were not looking where they were going. The poster to the left is available for purchase from our store. Watch Twitter and Facebook for specials involving this visual aid!

Of course, using one’s own hands for the bd connection is powerful as well. I had my students make a bed with their hands and use that as a quick reference for the correct direction for these tricky letters. Many times I caught a glimpse of a child making the bed surreptitiously under his or her desk so no one would see, then quickly would continue writing, able to form the letters correctly!  Any child can sound out the word bed, and in doing so will note that the left hand makes the shape of the b, the knuckles of both hands make the mattress, while the right hand forms the d.

I am sure there are a myriad of other ideas that help children with reversals! Feel free to jump in here and share your own helps! And when you have a few minutes, come by and visit our website because visuals is what we are all about.

Fingermapping & Visual Learners

A few years ago I was working with a group of kindergarteners. Their teachers had identified them as the children who were just not catching on to the reading concepts they were working on in class. Some  of the problems the children were having included missing letters, substitutions, and reversals. I patiently tried to sound out the words while they wrote them, but nothing seemed to make a difference. CAT still came out like CT or TAC. The children who struggled the most were ones who were using letters that did not appear in the word at all.

Tools That Help

I started using Alphabet Tales to introduce and link letter symbol to sound. This helped a lot. Using hand motions for the letters did as well, but reversals and omissions persisted.

Finally, in desperation, I started holding up fingers to represent each letter in the word. This time, I had the children look at my fingers as I sounded out the word, pointing to a finger each time I said a sound. This visual map made all the difference to the children. They SAW three sounds anchored on my fingers, so when they made three sounds with their mouths, they also expected to see three sounds represented on their paper. If they omitted the middle letter, I would draw their attention back to my fingermap and they would locate the sound that was missing from their word.

Fingermapping

For many years after, I used fingermapping with all ages of children with very happy results. I struggled to verbalize, however, why this simple practice was so vital to the learning of many of my children. I have recently come to understand that for those highly visual learners, hearing the sounds was an auditory process, writing was kinesthetic or tactile, but seeing the word mapped out on my fingers was a visual clue as to the structure of the word.

I’ve learned nearly everything I know from my students. There is nothing at all in the world like doing something and seeing the lights go on for children. In the case of fingermapping, the lights go on dramatically and results have been extraordinary.

 How It Works

Figure 2 is an illustration of the simplest of fingermaps seen from my own viewpoint (the letter sequence will look correct to the children facing me). As I sound /C/, I will touch the finger on the far right, as I sound /A/, I'll point to the middle finger, and so on. To me it looks right to left, but to my children it looks left to right.

I often take two lists of words and contrast them. For example, I use a short list of words with the AY ending, and another short list with AI in the middle: play, bay, say, may, spray, day – and – maid, laid, nail, pail, hail,  sail. As we play Quick Draw, I use fingermapping to cue the children as to which spelling of the long A sound we are using. I will teach them first that most of the time AY will be heard at the end of words, while AI will appear in the  middle of words. But sharing that rule is not sufficient for visual learners. They will benefit from SEEING something. So I use my fingers. I show AY by having two fingers stuck together to signify a sound made up of two letters. When my visual learners see that map, they instantly know what to write.

 If I call out a word with the AI spelling in the middle of the word, I will use the fingermap shown in Figure 4. The children will take a quick look at my hand  and they will then correctly write their word.

Moving Away from the Visual

It doesn't take long before the child can learn to rely more heavily on their ability to hear the sounds in the correct sequence – or maybe they make a mental visual of the map of the word. In any case, children do move away from having to have a fingermap displayed for them. What is so important about fingermapping for visual children is that this one practice might mean the difference between success and failure in reading. Using a visual tool such as fingermapping is very much like building a bridge over a gap in the road; a gap that would otherwise result in a halt in progress towards reading success.

How to Beat Those Tricky Vowels

One efficient way to discover challenges in reading that are common to all the grade levels is to be a Title 1 teacher for grades K-7. Before the year began, I expected to confront a myriad of problems, each child struggling with a unique set of issues.  What I found was that in most cases, what the kindergartner had a hard time with, the 3rd and 6th graders also had problems with. It does make sense. After all, if you don’t get something in kindergarten, just getting older is not going to suddenly bring understand where once there was a gap.

One weakness shared by most of the struggling readers was in identifying short vowel sounds in words. My students had a hard time memorizing word spellings, and because they were very weak on vowel sound discrimination, their spelling tests were torture for them. It followed that reading was torture for them as well.

The first thing I did for these kids was show them the visuals for the vowels and tell a hugely abridged version of the story for each letter. As you can imagine, the junior high kids were underwhelmed with my idea to show them little kid stuff. I did my usual “please forgive me, but just take a quick peek at these cards” and we quickly moved on. In spite of their grumbling, the visual worked beautifully to help cement the sound of the vowel. Visuals for the vowels:

We briefly talked about how the SOUND for short A is the sound at the front of “anthill.” I showed them our hand motion for A.

 We make an anthill with our fingers, and then touch thumbs to make the tunnel Abner made as he tunneled through the anthill (see Alphabet Tales for stories). For E, I asked the kids to make a fist and notice the lowercase E their fingers made. For I, we had an upraised hand similar to the feathers on Ike’s head. The O was Oscar’s wide open mouth, and the U was Uncle Ule’s up-side-down umbrella.

Having introduced the vowel sounds, related them to the symbols (letters), and having established our hand motions for those vowels, we next moved on to actually using these newly-acquired tools! We played little games together to practice listening for the vowel sound in words.

Listen for the Vowel:

I would call out a list of words, and for each word, the kids would do the hand motion for the vowel they heard. Sample word list follows:

Sand, tent, with, bus, off, Tom, bat, best, fresh, sun, punt, shop, west, nod, fun, fin, pen, pun, pan, pin, hop.

If you need a formal assessment for your students’ knowledge of vowel sounds, just have them number a paper, listen to each word, and write the vowel they heard inside ea.

Quick Draw:

To practice listening for sounds in words, and especially for distinguishing between vowel sounds, I found playing Quick Draw was very helpful. Each child has a white board, or if you are as lucky as I was, you will have enough room on your big white board to accommodate all the kids in your group. Each child stands with his or her back to the white board, marker ready, and then listens while I call out the word.

• “The word is CLASS.”

• “Sound it with me.” The kids sound with me as I segment the word for them, “C-L-A-SS.” I use the motion for A as we sound in order to give them a visual cue for the vowel. I am also using fingermapping, which gives them an instant visual map for the structure of the word. There will be more on fingermapping later.

• “Sound and Write!” This is the cue for the children to quickly turn and write their word as they say each sound. This part is critical. They need to say the sounds out loud and hear themselves saying the sounds, at the same time they are seeing their hand write the sounds.

• I do a quick visual check for accuracy and then move on to another word. If there is an error, I do not say the name of the missed letter, rather we SOUND OUT the word as the child is looking at the word they wrote so they can identify the missing sound and make the correction.

More Tips:

• If the child is reading for you and mispronounces a word, just cue him with the hand motion for the vowel sound.

• If you suspect your child is a kinesthetic learner, have him or her make the hand motion for the vowel sound as often as possible.

• Play Word Morph: start with one word, and then change a sound with each new word:

                EX: BAT, BIT, BUT, BOT (bought), BUT. Mix the words up so they are not in a predictable order and have the child give you the hand signal for the vowel again.

                You may also use word pairs for quick vowel sound practice: CUT/KIT, GNAT/NET, BET/BIT, COT/CUFF, NIT/NET. Hint: E and I are frequently taken for each other, as are O and U.

On the Importance of Glue

I’m not talking about Elmer’s glue. I’m talking about the function and value of the sticky stuff. Glue sticks things to other things. If something is stuck to another thing, it is likely to stay there and not fall off and get lost.

Take sticky notes, for instance. Without the glue on the back, you couldn’t write yourself “do not forget” notes and slap them on the edge of your monitor as task reminders. Without the glue on the back, those “do not forget” notes would pile up, get shoved to the side of the desk, end up under papers to file or bills to pay, and eventually wind up fluttering to the floor to mix with the dust bunnies.

Glue – the substance that sticks things to one another – plays a very important role in the education of young children. Following are some for instances.

Glue Concepts Together

Instead of teaching a child the whole alphabet, then teaching him or her to relate sounds to each  letter, try picking up an A, sound it, then pick up a T, sound it, then glue them together to make a word! Doing this will immediately show the child what letters and sounds are for, will show the child that combining letters together make words we can use to communicate with another person, and will encourage him or  her to want to construct more words to use! Once the A and the T are glued together, you can pick up an F, sound it, and glue it to the front of AT. Eureka! Another word, and only three sounds used!

Glue Symbols to Real Objects

Symbols are really hard for many young children to handle. They are abstract, and to a young child might seem totally arbitrary. I mean why does E have three arms and not five or six? Why do they point right instead of left or even down? Why does an S have to open to the right on top instead of being face down? Face it - symbols are boring, UNLESS you glue them to objects from real life that are interesting to the child. For instance, the zig-zag that is letter M is confusing to many children. Some write it like this: W. Some add an extra zig or zag. Gluing the symbol to something real makes learning it fun, and remembering it easy. Glue a kinesthetic element to learning the symbol for M by saying: Climbing UP the side of the mountain (puff, puff), whew! Made it to the top! Sit down, slide down the side…but wait! There is another mountain! So climb up the side (puff, puff, puff), whew! Made it to the top! Now, sit down, and slide all the way to the ground!

Glue Letter Sounds to Fingers

Those same children that have a hard time keeping track of all the details of letters, their shapes, their  sounds, frequently have a difficult time manipulating the arrangement of letters/sounds into words. The letters that are available from which to make words float like disembodied fragments in space with nothing to anchor them together or to the paper. When you are helping a young child write a word you say, it will help a lot if you anchor those individual letters to your fingers so they can SEE the sequence all at one time, and so they can see how many there are, what order they are in, etc. I call this practice “finger-mapping.” Just as a visual person will have an easier time with directions if he or she can see the route on a map – see the shape of the route on a map – even so, children will enjoy seeing the map of the word they are going to write.

Take the word CAT, for instance. Many young children, who are beginning to learn to read, mix up the sounds of a word when they write it, and very often they leave out the middle letter. If you hold up three fingers and assign each one to a sound, it will be easy for the child to see how many sounds there are, what order they go in, and he or she will be able to quickly identify which sound was left out by referring back to your finger map of the word.

Glue Parts to the Whole

It is far easier for a child to learn a concept if he or she can see where it fits into the general scheme of  things. You might call it “locating the part within the global whole.” One problem children have with the way reading is traditionally taught is that they learn how to read or spell a word, but then before they know what has happened, that rule has CHANGED. It is so confusing! Good example: how many ways can you pronounce ough? A child will learn at some point that ENOUGH sounds like ENUF. So it would appear that ough really says UF. Another time, he or she will learn that THOUGH sounds like thō. In this case, ough really says ō. Another day comes and THOUGHT is the new word. This word sounds like THŎT, the ough sounding like ŎT. Many a valiant child would give up at this point; nothing makes any sense. It is a great idea to try introducing all the variables together in their global whole. See the example here: Once children know that is all and no more, they will have no problem absorbing the idea that there truly are six ways to pronounce OUGH.

These hints are all powerfully visual and tactile, and make for the friendliest way to teach a child so that learning is easy and fun! Using these types of methods to teach will act very much like glue, in that you will attract the child to learning, and the concept will stick in their memory unforgettably.

Using Movement in Learning

When I was in graduate school, excited to learn how to teach in a way that would result in a better learning rate for children, I kept hearing people talk about incorporating movement in learning activities in order to benefit tactile and kinesthetic learners. I was curious about that, so I kept my eyes and ears open to see what I could learn.

Paper Feet Hop

One cute activity I came across was a set of footprints cut out of colored paper, each one containing a sight word written with magic marker. The activity was fun for the children because the footprints were taped to the floor of a long hallway and the children hopped on each footprint as they read the word printed on the paper. I was curious at the time how hopping on the paper footprints would help the child learn the words more readily and wondered if possibly because the activity itself was fun, it engaged the learner and made him more motivated to learn his sight words. I can’t really say for sure. My lingering question had to do with the fact that if the movement in the activity was supposed to facilitate learning, if the word on each footprint was different, yet the movements were all similar hops, how was the movement tied to learning? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and what I did was try and come up with movements that mimicked the meaning of the word.

Lean to the Right

1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20

I first started to pay attention to movement years ago while I was teaching a group of preschoolers. We had written the numbers 1-20 on a chart with four rows of five numbers. During circle time, children would take turns pointing to each number as they led the rest of the children in counting. One morning, Peter’s mother informed me that Peter had suddenly begun to count by fives and she was surprised, and quite frankly, really pleased. She wanted to know if we’d been working on counting by fives. I said no we hadn’t.

Curious, I began to watch Peter when he was leading the counting exercise. It happened that he would track to the right, pointing to 1, 2, 3, and 4, and when he got to 5, he would swing his body back to the left to quickly point to the 6. He moved the same way when he reached 10. I began to suspect that the swinging motion to the left became associated in Peter’s mind and body with the numbers 5, 10, 15, and 20.

Lame Man March

To try out the theory of movement prompting learning, when it was time to start learning to count by 2’s, we formed a line and marched as we chanted our numbers. We would lean heavily to the right each time we said an even number. “One, TWO, three, FOUR, five, SIX,” etc. Next, we repeated the same march, but we whispered the odd numbers and spoke the even numbers loudly while leaning heavily to the right. Finally, we just thought the odd numbers, but continued to lean and say the even numbers out loud. So we counted on hearing the even numbers at the same time our body leaned into the even numbers as a means of learning to count by twos.

Moves That Prompt Recall

A young friend of mine was sad that I was leaving his home after a visit. I assured him we could talk on the phone after I got home. He immediately asked for my phone number. “Hold on!” he shouted as he ran into the kitchen. “I need to punch it in.” I was amused to see him key my phone number on the microwave key pad. Then he announced, “Now I will never forget it!” And he didn’t forget!

A first grader I worked with several years ago had a really hard time remembering how to form an M. He always confused it with a W. We established that the M looked like MMmmmountains, and to this visual reference we added a motion of hands together and down, while elbows arch high up like mountain peaks. Whenever Joel came to that troublesome letter, if he did his mirroring motion, he always made the correct sound!

It’s true that some children don’t seem to rely much on movement that mimics the concept that is being taught; other kids, however, seem to be unable to learn without mirroring their learning with their bodies. For these children, any time we spend thinking up accompanying movements to learning is so worth the time investment!

Sample Activities

Sample Activities:
Download TryBuySnapWords -  After you download, print (two-sided), and cut out your sample SnapWords, you may use these sample activities with your child:

INTRODUCING NEW WORDS:

*Choose 1-5 sight word cards...display in pocket chart.
*Talk about each picture as it relates to the word it depicts. Let the children share what they see.
*Do the body motion together found on the reverse side of the cards.
*Use the word in the sentence provided.
*Identify the sounds in the word, whether single letter spellings, or multi-letter spellings, such as "ow" or a two-vowel spelling such as "ai."
*After introducing each word, check to be sure the children correctly read each word while looking at the fronts of the cards.

"POP UP" GAME

*With the class near you, explain that you are going to play a game in which they will "pop up" when they hear their name, and will come up to the pocket chart to choose a word they can correctly read.
*This game works best when the pocket chart is full of words, rather than displaying only a handful of words.
*Encourage children to be selecting a word when it is not their turn so they are ready to pop up quickly when their name is called.
*Do not use this activity for teaching; rather keep it moving quickly so that no child gets bored. Stop the game as soon as interest begins to wander.

"WHERE'S Word-O?"

*Display a group of words in the pocket chart.
*Call one word at a time, saying, "Where's ____?"
*Children will take turns trying to quickly point out the word called by the teacher.
*Do not use this as a teaching time, but rather as a review activity.

WHICH IS WHICH?

*With the children in two teams in front of you.
*Line the teams up so that the two children in the front of the line compete first.
*Hold up two cards at a time, asking "Which one is [say one of the words]?"
*When the pair of children have answered, they go to the end of the line.
*Give the teams points for calling out the correct word.

AROUND THE WORLD

*Display one card to a child for him to identify.
*That student will read the word, then choose a word card to display to another child.
*Continue through the group until all the words have been reviewed.
*This activity may be concluded by turning the cards to the back so that the children are reading the plain dolch sight words.

WORD FLIP

*Have students vote on which words, one at a time, they think they can recognize without using the picture.
*Flip those words over as they are voted on so that the plain word is displayed on the reverse.
*Take five minutes to review all the words per day.
*Limit the number of words flipped over to a couple of day depending on your group and their progress in recognition of the plain words.
*The goal to keep in mind when using the stylized sight words is to use the visual, motion and language as learning tools, then to progress to the plain side of the card as soon as possible.
*You may determine what is helping each child learn their words by asking "How did you remember that?" when they correctly and instantly read a word unstylized. Some will say they can still "see" the picture in their minds, some will remember because of the motion they have come to relate to the word. Asking your children this question frequently will guide them into learning about how they learn best.


These activities to teach sight words and word wall activities are part of our booklet "Activities For Use with SnapWords" - a free gift with every sight word order.