Practicing sight words can easily become tedious and can be especially challenging for beginning readers like my 4 year-old daughter, A.  That’s why we created a pack of 30 EDITABLE sight word games and shared Sight Word Cup Hunt – we’re determined to make all of that work fun for kids by creating sight word activities.

To make our nightly reading a little more colorful, and to give A the chance to practice reading sight words in real text, I recently created a new sight word activity: Rainbow Sight Word Hunt.  It takes just a few minutes to prepare and is completed over a couple weeks.

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Getting Ready

I gathered a few common supplies for the sight word activity:

Rainbow Sight Words {Playdough to Plato}

  • Paper in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and white
  • Black marker
  • Highlighters or markers in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple
  • Scissors
  • Glue
  • A favorite book that you don’t mind marking in (one with plenty of words)

Next, I cut each sheet of colored paper into eight equal rectangles. {I saved the white paper to make rainbow clouds later.} And since A is still learning to write, I wrote one sight word on each card so that she could trace it later.

Rainbow Sight Words {Playdough to Plato}

Now we were ready to read a rainbow!

Sight Word Rainbow Activity

A saw me prepping for this sight word activity and couldn’t wait to get started.  I laid out 10 words and then called her over to choose one.  She touched each one reading them carefully and then chose the green “the” card.  I handed her the black marker and she traced the word.

Rainbow Sight Words {Playdough to Plato}

Then, I handed A the green marker and her green “the” card and we headed over to couch for our bedtime reading.  I told that as I read to her, she was going to listen and look for her word “the.”  If she found one, she could color it with the green maker.  A was pretty excited she was getting to break one of our no-no’s: writing in books!

At first it was challenge for A to follow along with my finger and keep listening for the sight word. But after a couple pages, she started catching the words as soon as I read it.

Rainbow Sight Words {Playdough to Plato}

The next day we repeated the activity choosing one word to read during the day and one at bedtime.  After a week we had a rainbow on each page and A loved seeing how many words she actually could read on her own.  It’s a definite boost of confidence for those early readers.

I taped up the cards in A’s room to make a sight word rainbow showing her progress. Each day, we choose  a couple more words to add to the display.  The best part about this sight word activity is showing the kids their progress by adding to the list!

She loves looking at all the words she knows and is excited by the colorful addition to her room.  We still have several more words to go, but A’s enthusiasm for reading a rainbow has yet to disappear, unlike those fleeting real rainbows!

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Our best-selling Editable Sight Word Games in our shop bring so much fun to the classroom!

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