Sight word wheel

Q: Can I put in my class's own word list?

Yes. Open Entries, delete the words that are there and paste your list, one word per line. A list of 10 to 20 words works best for younger readers.

Q: How do I use it with the whole class?

Show it on the board with Present. Call a student up to spin, and the whole class reads the word together after them. It also works as a warm-up before a guided reading group.

Flash cards get boring by the third day. A spinning wheel turns the same practice into a small game: the word lands, the child reads it, and everyone wants another turn.

Click the wheel or press SpaceTap the wheel to spin

Entries, one per line

50 entries on the wheel

Paste a column from a spreadsheet, or type. Write Anna *3 to give Anna three times the chance.

Spin the wheel Classroom wheel spinner Sight word wheel

Fifty words that show up on every page

Sight words are the short, common words children should recognize instantly instead of sounding them out. Some of them, such as said, was or the, have tricky spellings, so children practice them until they know them at a glance. Together they make up roughly half of the words in a typical early reader.

This wheel holds 50 of the most frequent words from the classic high-frequency lists used in kindergarten and first grade. They are in no special order, so a child cannot guess the next one from the pattern of a worksheet.

Fifty words is a lot for one wheel, and that is on purpose: you can delete the ones a child already knows and keep only the tricky ones. The wheel saves your edited list in this browser, so the next practice starts from the same words. When the list gets short, add the next batch from your school's reading program.

What's on this wheel

the
and
a
to
said
in
he
I
of
it
was
you
they
on
she
is
for
at
his
but
that
with
all
we
can
are
up
had
my
her
what
there
out
this
have
went
be
like
some
so
not
then
were
go
little
as
no
look
come
here

A five-minute sight word routine

Press Spin and ask the child to read the word that lands, without sounding it out.
If they read it right away, use Remove from wheel to take it off; if they hesitate, leave it for another round.
For a harder version, ask for a sentence with the word, or have them write it on a whiteboard before the next spin.

Sight word wheel questions

Which list are these words from?

They come from the most frequent words in the well-known Dolch and Fry high-frequency lists, which are free to use. Most kindergarten and first grade programs teach these same words, though the order may differ.

Can I put in my class's own word list?

Yes. Open Entries, delete the words that are there and paste your list, one word per line. A list of 10 to 20 words works best for younger readers.

How do I use it with the whole class?

Show it on the board with Present. Call a student up to spin, and the whole class reads the word together after them. It also works as a warm-up before a guided reading group.

Are the words big enough to read on the wheel?

The winning word also appears large in the result box after each spin, so even a short word like a or I is easy to see from the back of the room.

Sight word wheel

Set aside

Results

My wheels

Put this wheel on your site

Fifty words that show up on every page

What's on this wheel

A five-minute sight word routine

Sight word wheel questions

Which list are these words from?

Can I put in my class's own word list?

How do I use it with the whole class?

Are the words big enough to read on the wheel?

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