Feed the Frog (Teaching Sight Words)

Jo - Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 2:30 pm
Categories: Homeschooling, Lesson Plans, Reading
Tags: bugs, clip art, craft, frog, games, sight words, words

I made a “Feed the Frog” game to teach children the basic sight words, which make up about 1/3 of all printed material. These words are: a, and, are, as, at, be, for, have, he, his, I, in, is, it, of, on, one, that, the, they, this, to, was, with, & you.

Here’s how I made the frog:

I drew (or to be honest, my husband drew) a frog on green foam sheet and cut him out. I also cut out the frog’s mouth.
I took a piece of red foam sheet and cut it so that the rectangle fitted on the back of the frog.
I cut out squares on all four corners of the rectangle and folded them up to form a box.
I hot-glued halfway up the corner edges to secure the corners.
I bent over the remaining sides to form a “lip” for the outer edges. (It kind of looks like a cake pan.)
I hot-glued the red “cake pan” to the back of the frog and trimmed the “lip” where it wasn’t attached to the frog.

Here’s how I made the bugs:

I found a clip-art bug that I liked.
Using a computer drawing program, I put each basic sight word on a separate bug so that I had 25 bugs.
I printed out the bugs on sheets of paper and laminated the sheets.
I cut out each bug by hand. (Yes, it was a bit of a pain, but when I saw how much fun my kids had with them, it was worth it!)

There are many ways to use this game. My children would pick a bug out of a bag (see image below), say the word, and “feed the frog” the word. If the child did not know the word, another child or an adult could help, or the child could put the word back into the bag until help was available.

It was a lot of fun to watch children play this game. I would pair them up: one child who was struggling with the words, and another who knew all of the words. These teams knew my rules well and knew that they were never allowed to criticize each other. If their partner did not know a word, they would be a team helper and tell the struggling child the word.

Some children made “ribbit” sounds as the frog ate, or made the frog burp after it ate all the bugs. I was okay with that because I knew if the frog was full, the children’s minds were growing and filling up also (burp!).

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