Can you believe it is already back to school for some children, and others are preparing to return or to start the school year at home?
One of the themes focused on at the beginning of the school year for our littles is All About Apples, and I want to share a simple yet fun activity you can do with your students or for those homeschooling your children.

Feed The Farmer The Apples

Feed The Farmer the Apples is a simple and fun game activity for teaching or reinforcing sight words. On each apple, there is a sight word for your little ones to learn/review.

What are Sight Words, and why are sight words important?

Sight words are common words like ‘my’, ‘look’, ‘the’ and ‘little’ that children need to recognize instantly. These words are commonly used in language and must be learned by memorization because they do not follow conventional spelling and phonetic rules and are difficult to sound out.

When our little ones are able to recognize words instantly by sight, they become fluent readers, which leads to them being able to comprehend what they read.

Some tips on teaching sight words:

• Teach your child a few words at a time. This will lead to your child being confident as words are gradually added to the list of words they are learning.
• Repetition is vital when teaching young children, so practice words on a daily basis because sight words will take some extra effort on the part of our little ones to learn.
• Read books with the words you are teaching to your little ones and have them find the words in the text as you read. 
• You can also allow your child to read text from the story with the words they are learning so that they are putting their newfound knowledge to use.
• Use words to compose sentences for your child to read so that they are getting some needed exposure, as children will learn a word after being exposed to that word anywhere from 4-14 times.
• Play games with the sight words so your little one will be learning while having fun.
• Place words around the home or the classroom as they learn them. I have sight words on the wall in my girls’ bedroom, and we read them at night before going to bed. 
• For children who are older and writing, encourage them to use the words they are learning whenever they are writing. My girls are not writing as yet, but in their journals, I write sentences they construct or write sentences for them to draw pictures.

Words included in our download:

Our download comes with the farmer’s face and words.

How to prepare our Feed the Farmer activity

• Visit our shop to purchase your PDF 
• Print preferably on cardstock paper for durability.
• Laminate also for durability if this activity will be manipulated by many hands.
• Cut out all the apples and the farmer’s face.
• Get a box and glue the farmer’s face to it and cut out the mouth with a stencil knife. ( I used my hot glue gun to place my farmer’s face on the box.

After following the above steps, your activity is ready to create fun learning memories.

Suggestions on how to use our Feed The Farmer The Apple activity:

• Place some apples in a sensory base. (I used fake grass.)
• Introduce or review the words you will be focusing on to your child/children.
•  Have your child find the words and feed the apples to the farmer. (You can play a game f I-Spy.)
• Hide the words in and around your home or classroom and allow your littles to find them and feed them to the farmer calling the sight words on the apples.
• Use words to make sentences.
• Read a book and place the words on the floor or in a container. As you read together, find the sight words in the story; let your little ones find the correlating apple and feed the apple to the farmer.

Keep in mind that your little ones might be hesitant on their first attempt but will become confident over time with repeated exposure.

Follow This Link to our Shop to Grab your Feed The Farmer Game!

Send us pictures of your little ones using our activity so that we can share them in this article!😊

We do hope you find the information and activity in this article useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by sending us a message or visiting us @learning.stepbystep on Instagram, Learning Step By Step on Facebook and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for educational resources that will help you and your littles on their learning journey as they continue to Learn Step By Step!

Thank you for being here!

Kimberlee and the Learning Step By Step Team.

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