{Free Printable} Word Games- Sight Word Scarecrow Game

I am going to use the Scarecrow Word Sight Word Game in this post to play words games that focus on sight words with my son. I thought you might like a copy of it to use with your children. You actually may decide that you want to play different word games with it or work on other reading concepts instead. It has been purposely left open ended. Let me tell you about how I plan to use it.

As I mentioned we are going to use it for working on sight words. I found a list of first grade sight words online (my son is in first grade) and placed a number of them on one side of a 3×5 index card cut in half. The goal of this game is to read a word to move forward one circle in the game. If you misread a word, then you stay on the space you are on. I want to go through the pile of card more than one time with my son. Going one dot and a time means we will both have time to read each word more than once.

Once we have played the game by advancing space by space, I will introduce a die to the game. When we have to roll to see how many spaces to move forward, there is a chance we will get to move forward much faster. This means that this version will be one of those word games that can end quickly.

Introducing making up a sentence to go along with each word that children read will give them a chance to show that they understand what the word means. You can ask that the sentences have more than four words or more. It would be hard to come up with short sentences that make sense with these words. If you are working with children that love a challenge, you can tell them the sentence should be a statement or a question.

After playing the game with this first set of words several times, I will create another set using different sight words on index cards. Once the words in the first set are mastered, it will be important offer more challenging words. I may place a few of the old sight words in the stack on new words. Words that had given my son the most trouble will definitely need to be seen again.

Here are some other reading or word games you could play with this game board:

vowel sounds- share a word with the vowel sound on the card or tell the vowel sound of the word on a card
contractions- share what words make up a contraction
rhyming words- share a word that rhymes with the word on a card
spelling words- read the meaning of a word on a card and spell the word you think it defines.
synonyms and antonyms- read a word and share another word that means the same thing or the opposite of that word

There are probably dozen of other word games you could play with this game board with a scarecrow theme. (Click on the link to the left to download this free printable)