Sight Words Q Tip Painting Printables

Are you looking for a fun way to practice sight words and strengthen fine motor skills? Q-tip painting sight words is a great way to do both. We even offer q-tip painting printables for younger children who are not yet working on sight words. 

With this activity, children will develop hand-eye coordination and strengthen hand muscles while reading and spelling words. This printable set is a great addition to a literacy center. Not to mention, it’s such an easy activity. Children will have so much fun making words by using different colors of tempera paint.

Materials

• Q tips
• free printable sight word cards 

Directions

1. Print the sight word cards on card stock paper.
2. Cut the words apart. 
3. Dip the end of the q-tip into paint and paint a dot in each circle.
4. As an added bonus, encourage children to paint the dots by painting in the same direction they would form the letter. 

Make Rainbow Words

I have yet to meet a child who doesn’t enjoy color. Bring out the child’s artistic side by allowing them to make rainbow words in numerous ways. 

Here are a few ways to enjoy this fun activity:

• Paint consonants one color and vowels a different color.  
• Look for words with the same number of letters and paint them one color. 
• Paint words that start with the same letter in one color.
• Find rhyming words and paint them the same color. 
• Paint words with the same number of syllables in one color.

Hide-and-Seek Activities with Sight Words

What can you do with the words after you have painted them and the paint has dried? There are so many creative ways to throw in word practice without children even realizing they’re also learning.  As we all know, children absolutely love to play hide-and-seek.

So, why not incorporate some activities that involve the same concept?

• Hide the words and have the children read them as they find them.
• Have one group of children hide the words and another group find them. After they’re found they have to guess which child hid the card they found. 
• Hide two sets of the same words. Once children find a word they have to race to find who has the matching word. 
• Paint two sets of the same words and use them to create a memory game. While it is not necessarily hide-and-seek, it still involves the concept of seeking something. 

Gross Motor Activities with Sight Words

All too often children are spending so much time indoors on electronics or doing schoolwork. Gross motor skills are extremely important for a child’s development. It benefits their ability to dance, run, walk, reach, and balance. Next time you’re outdoors or in the gymnasium, throw in a gross motor activity that goes hand in hand with these sight words. This undoubtedly is going to benefit the children as they’re learning both motor and literacy skills. 

Here are some great ways to combine gross motor skills and sight words together:

• Lay the cards in a path, leaving space between each word. Read the word and jump over it. 
• Race down to a designated area to find a certain word.
• Tape or glue the words to a large poster board. Have each child take turns “hitting the target” by throwing a small bean bag or ball to a designated word.
• Lay the words on the floor of the basketball court or gymnasium. Have children dribble a basketball around the words and read them as they go. 

Fine Motor Activities with Sight Words

Fine motor play is a great activity for children to take part in on a regular basis. Strengthening fine motor skills benefits children in numerous ways. They use these skills to eat with utensils, to write with pens, pencils, and crayons, to button and zip their clothing, and more. Adding sight words allows them to work on both fine motor and literacy skills at the same time. 

Here are some simple ways to combine fine motor skills and sight words together:

• Simply have the children trace each word with their fingers.
• Have the children manipulate pipe cleaners to mimic letters and then use them to outline the words.
• Encourage children to pick up pom poms one by one and place them on the sight words to outline them. 
• Place multiple sight word papers in a tote. Give each child a chance to pick up one piece of paper with tweezers and read it out loud.  

Sensory Play Activities with Sight Words

Sensory play is a creative way for children to stimulate their senses while also learning. There are multiple ways to offer sensory play in the classroom. For instance, water play, sand play, and shaving cream are all fun ways to trigger a child’s senses. 

Here are some fun ways to combine sensory play and sight words together:

• Cut each letter of each sight word into small squares. Add them to a sand table and give children the chance to find each letter that creates a word.
• Laminate the sight words and allow children to mimic the letters of the words by rolling and shaping play-dough.
• Create sensory bags by adding clear gel and paint to a ziploc bag. Ensure the bag is closed securely with no air. Place the sight word paper beneath the bag and trace the word. The thickness of the gel will hold the shape of the word.
• Laminate the sight words and then have fun tracing the words with shaving cream.

Other Activities for Sight Words

There are so many other ways to enjoy this q-tip painting sight word activity. Here are some other ideas you may want to incorporate into your daily learning:

• Put the words in alphabetical order. 
• Arrange the words in rainbow order.
• Order the words from longest to shortest.
• Incorporate a “hot potato” type game where the child who is holding the card must read it.
• Play a “musical chairs” type game where each child sits in a chair with the sight word taped to the seat and they must read the word as they sit down. 
• Give each child a card and have them work together to form a sentence. 

Regardless of the sight word activities you choose to take part in, each offers a fantastic way to sneak in word practice! Learning sight words is such an important aspect of a child’s reading career. Sight words are simply words that children know by sight without having to sound them out.

Download the Sight Word Painting Cards

However, to give more context, Scholastic.com reads, “When you see lists of sight words, what you are usually seeing are lists of high frequency words or Dolch Words. Edward William Dolch first compiled the full list and broke it down into five levels for children to learn by sight. They are a list of 220 words that are used so often in print that together they make up an estimated 75% of all words used in books. Some of the words cannot be decoded using conventional strategies so memorizing them until they are known by sight is beneficial.”

To add to this fact, many sight words go against traditional phonetic conventions our children learn. Therefore, memorizing these words by sight is an easier process than even attempting to sound them out. In the end, offering children creative ways to learn sight words is not only fun, but it pays off because it gives them more time to focus on learning harder words. Not to mention, with sight words making up three quarters of the words we read in books, children are going to recognize the majority of words in whatever they are reading. 

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