A few years back I attended a wonderful conference where the presenter discussed the fact that an average learner needs about 35 exposures to a word for it to become automatic. A struggling learner may need more than 50 exposures before a word is recognized, and may take as many as 150 exposures to master it automatically!!!
Road Race (Texas Center for Reading and Language Arts, 2000) is one of the great resources she provided as a way to increase students' exposure to sight words. Have you played this before? The game board was quite bland, so I went ahead and created my own by adding some cute clip art from Scrappin Doodles.
I love this game and so do the kids! The kids really like driving the little car around the game board. (You can find little cars in the party favor section at Target.) I especially love how the child goes through and reads the pile of words over and over again, therefore increasing their exposure to the words. I also use this game for letter and letter-sound identification. I haven't done so myself, but I am sure you could even use it for number identification or math facts!
