Sight vocabulary for children
Print your own flash cards
I had noticed a couple of people have written words stuck to objects around their homes and wondered why. I was told the idea is to help build their child’s sight vocabulary, associating the word to the object hopefully remembering and recognising it later. Learning to read.
A friend said she also has individual flash cards with each word on and asks her daughter to find the object written on the flash card. A hunt around the house follows hopefully resulting in finding the correct object, recognising and matching the words.
I thought there is nothing to loose by trying flash cards, so I set up a template to print the words. I have turned this into a .pdf (find below) for others to download and use.
Download printable sight vocabulary words here (??kB). This is a .pdf document you will need Adobe Acrobat to open it. To download the site vocabulary I would recommend right clicking the link and choosing the save target to disk (or similar depending on your browser and operating system). Once you have downloaded the document, open it and and you will see 10 words per page. Print the page at 100% otherwise some of your cards will be bigger than others. I have included trim marks to help cut out the words. The trim marks are set in to allow for most printers margins. I printed the words onto some spare photo paper (238g/m2) so they would hopefully be more durable than ordinary paper. I stuck the cards up using BluTack.
The document above contains the following words:
blackboard, drawer, lamp, bedroom, fruit bowl, bath, fish tank, bookcase, door, dishwasher, wardrobe, table, window, stairs, settee, computer, radiator, fridge, chair, television.
Flash Card Typeface
The document is set in a font called Sassoon Primary which I noticed my daughter’s nursery uses in it’s printed material. The font uses the style of letters which children are taught as they learn to write (I believe). The set includes some alternatives, such as an ‘f’ with or without a descending tail. I also noticed that a commercially available set of flash cards my daughter was given is set in Sassoon Primary as well.
You can buy Sassoon Primary from this external site if you wish to use the font for your own documents (you do not need it to print the pdf). It is available for Mac’s (Postcript) and PC’s (Postscript and Truetype).
Other Flash Card Word Lists
This list is designed to allow the word to be stuck on or near the object, but after reading about sight vocabulary I understand there is a list of commonly occurring words which, when learned, will help a child to recognise 40%-70% of words in any text (the estimate seems to vary a fair bit). I aim to make a pdf which includes these words or at least 100 of them. When it is finished I will post it here as well.
Create your own Flash Cards
I was thinking about .pfd files and what you can do with them and wondered if I could create a document which would allow you to type in your own words and then print out custom flash cards. I am certain this can be done but not sure if it would be possible to ‘centre’ the word. Even if you can’t I don't think it would look too bad. Once I have a DIY pdf complete I will add it to this page.