Here is an activity I use with my small groups to help reinforce sight words, fluency, and reading with expression using the first 300 sight words from Fry's Instant Sight Word List (1980). According to Fry, the first 300 words represent about 67% of all the words students encounter in their reading.
I broke the phrases up into sets of 100 with 20 phrase cards for each set of 100. Each phrase/sentence has a punctuation mark at the end to help encourage students to read with the appropriate expression. I also give suggestions in the download for how to use the cards such as, "Phrases Around the World" and "Guess My Punctuation."
While instructing, I spend time discussing the importance of punctuation and what happens to our voices when we see a period, question mark, and exclamation point at the end of sentences. It always surprises me how many students think that when they see an exclamation point at the end of a sentence that it means the character is yelling. In turn, I always reinforce that exclamation points mean to read with some type of emotion, and when reading within a text they need to think about the context to see what type of emotion it may be. When using phrase cards, I allow them to use whatever type of emotion they feel comfortable doing.
(We also play another game where the students select an additional card naming an emotion. I did not include the emotion cards, but perhaps they will show up as a freebie sometime soon!!)
Thank you!
Enjoy!
