Keeping it Fun!

Sometimes the biggest challenge when working with kids who have learning challenges is how to keep them motivated...Let's face it, everything they need to learn is not always fun...in fact some learning can be pretty dry. For example, learning your sight words. This tends to take a lot of "drill and kill" methodology, right? And I can totally understand why a 6-year-old might make that face at me when they see "those flashcards" again! My students tend to need even more repetition with these words than the "average" student, which makes keeping the motivation level high particularly important.

So, to keep it fresh, I designed a system that gives the student a concrete way of monitoring their own progress with learning their sight words. The school that I work at calls the kindergarten sight words "popcorn words" because they have a tendency to "pop"  out at you everywhere you look! These are their popcorn work folders:

To help track progress in a non-judgemental way, I have benchmark icons that they progress through on their way to mastery. For example, when they first learn a word, they are in the "turtle" stage...they know the word but it may take them a few seconds to identify it. After 5 correct times of identifying the word, they progress to the "Rabbit" stage...they know the word more quickly or "quick like a bunny". After 5 times recognizing their bunny words, they progress to the "Fox" stage because foxes are very wise! and finally after recognizing it 5 more times it moves onto their personal word ring.

The board works sort of like a gameboard. Each day, instead of pulling out the sight word flash cards, they open their folders...now when they read one of the sight words to me they get to move it to the next space on the board. I also have them practice spelling the sight words 1-2 times per week by either building them with letter tiles or writing them on white boards. By the time they have reached the end of the board, they have read each word 20 times!! and practiced spelling it 6-8 times. The words that graduate to their word ring are words they truly know!

I have made each folder different by decorating the front with different sticker themes. This way, I do not have to put names on the folders and they can be reused year after year. One person has the snowflake folder, one the smiley face folder, etc...

You could use the same idea for letter identification, number identification or any other rote skill that you want to make more fun!