Practicing Sight Words and Phonics with BOOM Cards

Something I often said to my kindergarten students was, “Don’t forget to practice your sight words and review your letter sounds!” We learn new sight words and various phonics skills throughout the entire school year and, of course, we practice them as much as we can in the classroom. Whether it be during your morning routine, during small-group reading, as you’re walking out of the classroom… seriously ALL THE TIME! But sometimes, students still need a little extra support. Can they ever really have enough practice as developing readers?

Last year, Deanna and I created a sight word instruction unit – Not Your Mother’s Sight Words. We know teachers are loving it, so we wanted to add an additional way for students to practice sight words and phonics in the order they were taught. With this purpose in mind, we created BOOM learning cards to support your daily instruction.

BOOM learning decks are an amazing way for students to practice a variety of math and literacy skills in or out of the classroom. These activities have been a HIT with the amount of virtual learning happening throughout education. They have actually been around for quite a while, but I was excited to learn more about them in the last year.

I will say, Boom cards are great! The self-correcting aspect helps hold students accountable in their learning. Plus, did you know if you have a Boom learning account with your students, you can view progress reports for each kiddo? It shows how many attempts and how many corrections for each learning deck. This is an awesome resource to help teachers and gives them direction for needed additional support.  

Each week, the deck of activities from our NYMSW Boom Cards unit, supports your sight word instruction right along with phonics, too! You will find sound and sight word tasks, as well as, various phonics skills being practiced. Plus, we threw in sentence work with the sight words, too! AND, teachers are loving this part!  

So, you might be thinking, “I don’t have a Boom Learning account.” Not. A. Problem. You can set up a FREE account on the Boom Learning website. Click HERE to do that now. The Boom Learning platform is so great that is allows you to create a “fast-pin” link. After you do this, you can easily copy and paste that link and add it to Seesaw or Google Classroom… or, really anywhere that you can send a link to students. Your students DO NOT need a Boom learning account for these sight word activities to work.

Although our sight word curriculum is bundled for kindergarten and first grade, we decided to make the BOOM learning card units separate. Get your students practicing sight words and phonics with these fun games:

• BOOM Not Your Mother’s Sight Words | Kindergarten
• BOOM Not Your Mother’s Sight Words | First Grade

If you want to learn more about sight instruction, I have a FREE webinar that shares some great tips on teaching sight words. You can sign up for that here:

• Sight Words Made Easy Webinar

The sight word BOOM cards are for practice after teacher instruction, they are not meant to take the place of that. If you are looking for sight word instruction, you can find that curriculum here:

• Not Your Mother’s Sight Word Curriculum for Kindergarten & First Grade