One Breath Boxes

In my classroom I am always trying to find a healthy balance between phonemic awareness, phonics and sight words. When I first started out in first grade I was pushing the sight words, we would do tons of activities, flash cards and group games.

And it didn't actually work! So I sat down and thought about what I could do to quickly and efficiently review sight words without the drill and kill.

Introducing one breath boxes!
How do they work? For my red group we will use them during guided reading and for my higher groups they will use them once a week in centers.

The premise if that you take a deep breath and try to read all the words in a box without stopping. If you successfully complete the first box you move onto the second. After the child has mastered the first page of fry words 1-25 I will flip it over to version two where the words are in another order!

Here is a video of us using these in our guided reading group! This is only the 3rd time we ever did it so I was pretty impressed. :) Give them a try in your classroom and let me know what you think!!