Cordy has recently discovered the fun in letters and spelling words. Programs like Word World and Sesame Street on PBS are now the most requested in our house. She can spell words like rocket, water, bed, and any other word that was built on the latest episode of Word World.
When Parent Bloggers Network asked me if I wanted to review Meet the Sight Words I took a look at the packaging and agreed. The words looked like little people, so I figured Cordy would love it.
Meet the Sight Words teaches kids some of the most common "sight words" - words that children have a hard time reading without just memorizing them outright. The 40 minute DVD covers sight words that kids will use most often, like of, that, he, the, said, and play. Each word is shown one at a time on the screen, followed by the word morphing into an animated character (or two) and being portrayed in a little animated scene. For example, the word "for" becomes a camel, traveling across the desert in Egypt, and "of" is a little round guy with a wrench fixing a leaky pipe.
While I found the DVD to be a little dull for me, with no plot and the same words repeated over and over, my daughters both enjoyed it. (But hey, it's not for me, is it?) Once she figured out the format, she'd see each new word and ask, "What word is next, mommy?" She really wanted to learn the words. And the simple animations captured the attention of Mira, too.
My only complaint with this DVD is that many of the word animations have nothing to do with the word itself. I would have liked to see the animation tie into the words better, perhaps even using it in a sentence that explains what's happening in the animation to show kids where the word fits. The part I liked the best was at the very end, when a short story is read, with each word being highlighted on the screen, showing how they all fit together.
Overall, Meet the Sight Words is a good learning tool for helping your early reader memorize sight words.
1 comment:
Sight Words by definition are words that can not be represented by visual cues. They are the most common words in books that don't follow basic decoding rules and can't be represented by pictures. That is why a good reader needs to be able to memorize them because they can't look the the page of the book for help like they can with "cat" or "dog". If you want words that can be represented by pictures that have something to do with that word then they wouldn't be "sight words!" Both my 2 and 4 year old children learned over 45 sight words from these amazing DVDs in about 3 viewings.
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