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When it comes to learning sight words, students need a lot of practice and repetition! This can become monotonous for young kindergarteners, so it’s fun to switch things up whenever possible. These editable sight word mystery pictures are a great option! Keep reading to take a closer look at this fun way to help your students practice their word reading skills!
Creating a sight word mystery picture takes no time at all! I have created templates that make it easy to create these sight word activities with just a few keystrokes and clicks of the mouse.
After opening the template in Adobe Reader, you will just enter your words in the spaces provided. In order for the picture to turn out, you do need to use unique words (you can’t use the same word for two different colors.) If the finished image will have white, you will also add an “extra” word that won’t be practiced on the handwriting portion of the worksheet. Students won’t color the boxes containing the extra word, leaving it white on the final picture.
Once you have entered your words, you just need to click over to the worksheet to see the magic happen! The words will be added to each box automatically. It’s as easy at that!
Next, you’ll print out your sight word coloring sheets. The best part about these mystery pictures is that they truly are a mystery! Many color-by-word worksheets have the outline of the objects in the picture, which makes it easy to see what the final picture looks like. Since these sight word mystery pictures use square pixels, students are in suspense for a little bit longer!
The final step is for students to complete the activity. First, they will read and write each sight word on the right side of the page. Above each word is a simple sentence telling them what color to use for that word. (This is great practice with color words!) Once they have written each word, they can look for the word and color it on the page. Some students like to focus on one word at a time, while other students like to approach the task box by box.
Either way, it’s so fun to hear students try to guess what the mystery picture is as they work to complete the picture! They get so wrapped up in solving the mystery, they don’t even realize they’re hard at work strengthening their fine motor skills and improving their word recognition!
These sight word mystery puzzles are fun and easy to use in many different ways! Here is just a handful of the different ways that you can use this low-prep resource in your kindergarten classroom:
Thanks to the consistent format of these activities, students will know exactly what to do when they see one on their desk. This makes it a great activity for morning work! After putting away their backpacks, students can sit down and get right to work while you deal with the many things needing your attention. By the time the students are finished with the picture, they’ll be all warmed up for a day of learning!
These mystery pictures are also helpful for practicing vocabulary in other content areas! From color words to shape names, you can choose any words that you’d like your students to practice writing and recognizing. Mystery puzzles can definitely be a helpful tool for math or science vocabulary practice!
Another way that you can customize mystery pictures is to use them for extra practice with phonics patterns! You can easily create coloring pages with words that match the focus phonics skill in your current curriculum unit. You could use words from just one word family or you could use words with the same vowel sound but different ending sounds.
Mystery puzzles are also a great tool for differentiated skill practice! You could customize these mystery puzzles to correspond with words you’re focusing on during small group intervention time. For students who need more of a challenge, you could create mystery puzzles that focus on more advanced phonics patterns or sight words. Since it just takes a moment to create these puzzles, you don’t have to spend hours of prep time creating differentiated practice activities for your class!
Mystery puzzles can be a fun activity to use as homework! The directions are simple, so students can get right to work on them at home with minimal assistance from their parents and guardians.
Finally, mystery puzzles are an excellent way to bring some seasonal fun to your classroom without sidelining the learning process. It never fails that students become a bit more excitable when holidays are around the corner. Seasonal activities like these mystery puzzles give students a way to channel some of that excitement into a worthwhile learning activity!
To save you some time, I have put together a bundle of editable sight word mystery pictures that will last all school year! This bundle is organized by season, so you can create your own mystery pictures to use throughout the year as your students learn and grow. You’ll find mystery puzzles for back to school season, fall, winter, spring, and summer for a total of 15 different templates! If you’d like to take a closer look at the designs included in this bundle, just head over to the A Spoonful of Learning Shop or my TPT store.
Be sure to save this post so you can quickly find it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to easily find this post when you’re looking for fun sight word practice activities for your students!
These alphabet books will have students dive deep into learning about each letter of the alphabet while eager to see what activity they get to complete next!
