Customer Reviews

Dolch Sight Word Activities: Grade K-1, Volume 1

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was very disappointed by this book.

1. It has exactly the same four exercises for every set of six sight words. The pattern just repeats over and over again.

2. Not much effort has been made to make the activities attractive to kids.

2. The sight words are presented in an order that does not correspond with the frequency of the words. The pre-primer words are not presented much, if at all.

3. Some of the exercises involve tracing the words, but the format for tracing is strange. The letters to be traced are printed in very heavy, thick dotted lines, so that a pencil line is barely be visible through the dots.

I perfer this form to the format of the current "spectrum Sight Word Activites". In this format, the child is reading whole sentences starting form the end of lesson 1 (end of 1st week -- or 1st day in my son's case). Then it is words building on words. The words are not in the "grade levels" or in frequency order. There are not fancy color pictures or variety in the activites, but if it works, it works. The format matched my son's learning style, and for that reason I give it 5 stars.

I teach students who are severely handicapped and this book has been the only thing that has worked with one of my 1st grade students. He loves the work, the repetition and has learned almost 100 new words in the last 6 months and looking forward to him learning even more!

I started using this book with my 4 year-old-daughter. She is very bright and already loved learning at home and looking at books. Even though there are no color pages, she really loves working in this book. The first unit teaches kids to read a complete sentence of five words. We are now in unit 8 and she is recognizing her sight words in her books and beginning to read on her own. This book is great at connecting word memorization to everyday reading because the words the author(s) chose are so common and because students can read a sentence from the very first lesson. This book does not teach phonics (I never expected it to do that) so I have paired it with a School Zone Beginning Phonics book. The lessons worked best for us if I taught my daughter each unit's words (I made flash cards) and then let her do the unit's worksheets. My daughter can learn the five words in a few days and then spend 2-3 days completing the worksheets. Now that we are in Unit 8, we review previous unit's words every few days, as well. The repetitive exercises mean that my daughter has learned the directions and can work independently, which she loves.