Sight word books set 10: Patriotic

Hi, everyone! We’re moving closer toward Veterans Day, an American holiday that is observed every year on November 11 to honor people who have served in the armed forces.  Because of that, I created a set of patriotic emergent readers to use with our newest sight word activities.

Of course, this would also be a great set to use during the days surrounding Independence Day, July 4th, as well.

If you’re here just for the readers, zip to the bottom of the post for your download. If you’d like to learn more about how I teach my boys to read, you’ll want to read the entire post and check out the links to other resources.

(This post contains affiliate links.)

If you’ve been following along since I started offering free emergent readers, you know that I created these books to go along with the Reading the Alphabet preschool curriculum from This Reading Mama. I choose pieces of that age-appropriate, hands-on approach to reading to use with my Three and Five.  Then I create an additional set of sight word readers for each new lesson to challenge my Five.

Here’s what we’ve done this week:

1. My Three has been reviewing letter sounds.

I pulled out this printable from an earlier lesson of Reading the Alphabet.  This time I created magnet letters (you can get my free pattern here) so he could add the tires to the car on a baking sheet.  I showed him a picture from our pocket chart lessons and he had to put on matching tires to show the word’s first letter.

If you’re teaching a young preschooler to read, it’s important to keep in mind that they often learn at a slower pace than older preschoolers.  My Three only wanted to do about 10 cards, so we quit.  I don’t want to frustrate him or turn him off to reading.

Since it’s Fall, we did this beginning letter matching activity with a pumpkin printable.  (This is a freebie from This Reading Mama – check out her pumpkin pack.)  My Three enjoys sitting down with me to do one-on-one activities like this one. With three other siblings (soon to be four!), he doesn’t get enough time with just Mommy.

2. My Five has been reading and spelling short vowel words.

He’s been working on our Read ‘n Stick mats.  (See my entire collection of word family printables on this page).

Have you seen my list of decodable books for short a?  My Five doesn’t usually enjoy them because “they don’t make sense!”, but we did spend a little time reading some of this collection.

One day while I was working in the kitchen my Five started making words on the refrigerator with our magnetic letters. He came up with all of these himself until the last word. He asked if there were enough letters to make any other words, and I suggested “jig.”

3. Both my boys have spent time reading from our collection of sight word readers and leveled books. 

My Five is getting so much better at our leveled readers! I love to hear his fluency and expression improve! (This is a level C book I printed from the fantastic website Reading A-Z.)

4. We reviewed previously learned sight words.

5. We learned the new sight word through activities and books.

My Three, who has had trouble with the last few sight words, was happy to master “it” without any trouble.  He has just started to enjoy doing more drawing and “writing” on paper, so this Reading the Alphabet activity was fun for him.

He also loves the emergent readers that come with each lesson of Reading the Alphabet.  These are much simpler than the ones I create and are just at his level.  He still has trouble with “can,” so I read the first few pages until he wanted to take over.

I used the pocket chart lesson with both boys.

Patriotic emergent readers

6. My Five practiced used a variety of reading strategies to read my new set of emergent readers.

Because some of the concepts and vocabulary were new in United States Symbols, I kept this book very basic.

With the familiar sight words and repetitive pattern, my Five could focus more on finding chunks in those longer words – like liberty.

When reading The Fourth of July, I included more variety in the text — this allowed my Five to use a combination of phonics and context clues to figure out words like pop and hear.

How to assemble:

• Print pages 2-9 front to back (page 1 is my Terms of Use).  Print in color or grayscale.  
• Cut across the horizontal center of each page.
• Insert one set of pages into the other, paying attention to the page numbers.
• Staple with a  long-armed stapler.

Check out the rest of our collection! 

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