Turning On The Dolch Word Light Bulbs

Are some of your students struggling with the Dolch Word lists?  Here are some helpful tips that might turn the light bulbs on.

Children enjoy games.  Making things fun for students takes the drudgery out of memorizing things, as one of my little ones said:  “We were having so much fun we didn’t even know we were learning!”

I truly believe that learning and fun should go together.  If children enjoy learning they will WANT to come to school and you won’t have problems with discipline because students will be engaged in learning because they aren’t bored.

The Traceable Dolch Word Card packets  provide a tip list of a variety of activities you can incorporate into centers and games for students so they can immerse themselves with these words.

I've also designed Dolch Word Bingo Bonanza for all the word lists. If you get students looking for, and using the words they will learn them.

I've discovered that looking at the words separately and trying to figure them out, is difficult for some students. Memorization is also very boring.

We teach students all sorts of attack skills when they read, yet we give them a “list” of Dolch words and hope for success.

I find that some children do so much better if they can see these words in a group.  So I’ve made up phrases using the words.

These can be found in My Read, Trace & Write Dolch Word Phrase Packets.   They include trace and write the phrase-skill sheets, 40-60 phrase cards, a letter home to parents, 3 recording “good reader” sheets, and 2 certificates of praise.  These make great Daily 5 activities.

It’s important to get parents on board to reinforce lessons at home to get struggling children over the hump as there is just not enough time for all the one-on-one needed at school. 

Click on the links below to view/download whatever packet you need.

My Read, Trace & Write Pre-Primer Dolch Word Phrase Packet 

My Read, Trace & Write Kindergarten Dolch Word Phrase Packet

My Read, Trace & Write First Grade Dolch Word Phrase Packet

My Read, Trace & Write Second Grade Dolch Word Phrase Packet

My Read, Trace & Write Third Grade Dolch Word Phrase Packet

When a student achieves success with one packet they can correct the phrases and turn them into sentences by adding capital letters, punctuation and a word or two to complete the thought.   Continue to raise the bar, and challenge students to move on to the next level of words.

Finally, I really think that teaching students the words phonetically helps a lot.  I’ve had wonderful success turning the light bulb on when some students just don’t get it when I rhyme things.

I actually think it is much easier to break the words down this way and feel most students could learn a lot more words across the board if we taught them “off the list” and grouped them by sound instead.

I’ve compiled an anchor chart of a Phonetic Dolch Word List.  Click on the link to view/download it.

I hope these things help your students enjoy reading and learning new words, as those light bulbs turn on and start to shine brightly!

"The only place success comes before work, is in the dictionary." -- May Smith

Compound Words, Sight Words, Dolch Words.... So Many Words So Little Time, So Here Are Some Time Savers:

I love making alphabetical lists of words to use as a checklist to help me find things as well as give to parents as a check off list to use to high light when their child knows a word.

Compound words is something that students from Y5 on up need to know.

I wanted to compile a list of as many compound words that I could think of so that I could draw from it to help me dream up compound word projects for my kiddo’s.

I thought maybe there might be a little over 1,000 words.  Was I surprised to come up with almost 3,000!

I hope you find it helpful; it took me hours to compile. If you think of others that I missed, please shoot me an e-mail so that I can add them.  It would be fun to hit 3,000. diane@teachwithme.com

A valuable tool for your classroom would be to make a student-driven anchor chart of compound words by using a piece of tag board.

Label the top: Compound Words and divide the poster into 3 columns.

The first column will be the beginning word, the second, the ending word and the third column will be the compound word. i.e. base   ball   baseball.

Brainstorm with your students to see how many compound words they can come up with in a few minutes and then have them write them on the poster.

Throughout the year, as they say or read a compound word, have them put it on the poster.

Share with them that you have a list of 2,602 compound words and challenge them to collect 100, or whatever number you deem appropriate for their age group.

How about 100 by 100 Day or the end of the school year?

click on the link to view/download Compound Word List

I also made up 2 alphabetical word list posters.  One is of “most used sight words” and the other pre-primer through 1^st grade Dolch words.

They are in convenient paper-size poster format, which is perfect for a mini-anchor chart.

Click on the link to view/download Sight Word Dolch & Word Posters

Be sure and pop back tomorrow for more teaching tips.