Sight Word Wands

Hey'all! If you follow me on Instagram (@funwithfirsties), then you may have seen this pic I posted a couple weeks ago:

These are sight word wands! 

There are so many different ways to use these magical little sticks, but right now, I use about 5 different wands a week as reinforcement when introducing a new set of sight words. 

I usually introduce between 2 and 5 new sight words at the beginning of each week. I pick words based on how I can use them in a catchy phrase to help kiddies remember. For example, this week I am introducing the words "the," "little," "can," and "jump," and will introduce them using the phrase, "the little frog can jump." We will add these words to our word wall, sight word celebration board (stay tuned! I'll be blogging about this later in the week!), and I also have the words displayed on our magnetic whiteboard with alphamagnets all week (throughout the day, I mix up the letters in one of the words and the kiddies get to put them back in order for a little extra practice...they LOVE this!).

ANYWAYS, the wands featuring our sight words of the week are left in the reading center/library (along with any sight word wands from previous weeks). The kiddies can choose a wand and see if they come across that word in their book as they read. Whenever they find a word, they get super excited and show all of their friends in the library...you'd honestly think they had found a pack of Skittles hidden in the book. It's honestly as simple as that!

I have three sets of sight word wands ready to go (pre-primer, primer, AND first grade) since the majority of my little learners this year are coming in at a beginning SK level.

Okay, so here's how I made them!

First I printed off the stars:

Click any of the following options for your FREE copy: Pre-Primer -- Primer -- First

Next, I folded each page in half and cut each star out so when I opened up a star, it was still attached at the folded point (this way the stars are double-sided and will leave a "pocket" in between the front and back...this will make sense shortly!)

I laminated each star and cut a little groove at the bottom (yes, this was totally tedious, but my theory is: once you've done it once, you never have to do it again!). 

The point of cutting out a groove is to break through the laminating which was "gluing" the front and back papers together, leaving a space in the middle to slide a popsicle stick in:

(this photo is taken looking at the bottom of the star, down into the cut groove)

For most stars, I could just pinch the two sides of the star together and the pocket would pop open. But some stars were being finicky so for those I just used tweezers to get between the two sides and slide my popsicle stick in. I used a hot glue gun to put a bit of glue on the end of the popsicle stick and then slide it in to the star. 

Did any of that make sense???!?! 

I feel like it sounds so complicated but it was really super easy...just somewhat time consuming. 

That's it for now, have a great week everyone!