Slap-A-Word....or whatever you want to slap :)

I have been working with decoding words, and recognizing harder sight words with my students.  The placement I am in now I am working with kids who need a little extra help.  The curriculum we use is usually pretty scripted, and you have to find your own way of making it yours.  My teacher does a good job getting them to use different voices and be interactive.  The voices didn't go over too well with me, suddenly they were too cool for this.  So I tried to think of games that I could get the kids involved in that will help them decode and recognize sight words.  So I went through my Pinterest boards to see if I had pinned any good ideas.  Got to love Pinterest!  I had pinned a game I could play with my students, called Slap-A-Word.  I can't take all the credit as the idea was posted on Pinterest from Chalk Talk.

I typed up sight words they are working with through the book we use for reading, as well as their challenge words that work with certain vowel patterns, prefixes and suffixes, and compound words.  Then I took a trip to the Dollar Tree to see if I could find some awesome fly swatters.  My cooperating teacher I am working with mentioned she saw huge ones at the Dollar Tree during Easter weekend when she was up north.  I walked in and the first thing I saw were these huge fly swatters.  I picked up three of them, and was back the next day to pick up one more.  They only had three left, and the lady said they wanted to get rid of them.  I told her I would gladly take the rest of them.

I am going to start working on basic multiplication facts with two of my students to build confidence in them, by doing a game similar to this one.  You could also do letters when working with recognizing letters, do it with sounds, or vocabulary.  The ideas are endless with what you can do with these huge fly swatters.  But be warned kids can get super excited, and kind of loud at times.  I loved listening to the kids laugh and get excited during our game.  One kid even got so excited that a fly swatter broke.  He felt really bad, but I told him that is what duck tape is for. 

Below is a picture of my students playing as well as a video.  You can see that they are pretty big fly swatters.  They absolutely loved playing this game. Make sure you have your volume up when watching the video so you can hear the kids excitement!