Sight words are those common words that kids see and recognize instantly. They’re quite important, as mastery of sight words helps to make reading much faster and more intuitive so that your child may improve their fluency.
While websites such as Kindergartenworks can help you to prepare physical lessons to practice with and others, like Mastery Genius, can offer you entire online interactive and adaptive curriculums that include sight word practice, sometimes it’s fun to ‘mix things up’ a bit by simply delivering a little learning with some sugar-coating in the form of a game.
With that in mind, we’ve got a little something for everyone, with monsters, dinosaurs, safari animals, and both competitive and non-competitive approaches delivered in friendly game formats to catch and keep your child’s attention.
Let’s take a look at 12 free online sight word games to make learning more fun.
Our Favorite Free Online Sight Word Games
Here are a few of our favorite free online sight word games that your child is sure to love! Make sure to keep reading below for a more detailed description of each game:
- The Dinosaur’s Eggs
- Kitten Hop
- Snowball Fight
- Dolch Sight Word Bingo
- Sight Word Safari
- Sight Word Smash
- Outer Space Sight Words
- Spell the Sight Word
- Starfall Sight Words
- Teach Your Monster to Read
- Tell A T-Rex
- Out of Sight Words
The Dinosaur’s Eggs
The Dinosaur’s Eggs is a sight words game for that lets you select a list of words, which are then taught by listing the words on eggs, placed between a Saber-toothed Tiger on the left, and a Tyrannosaurus on the right. The word is read aloud and selecting the wrong egg produces no reactions, while clicking the correct egg will cause a baby dinosaur head to emerge. The Tyrannosaurus then roars, while the tiger scratches a tree next them to keep score.
While wrong selections do not produce a negative feedback from the dinosaur or tiger, the game does note them in order to let you know which ones were problematical. It’s good, simple fun, and they provide many sight words based on frequency of use to ensure there are plenty to practice with!
If you would like to play The Dinosaur’s Eggs, you can visit them at ICT Games.
Kitten Hop
Kitten Hop is a fun sight words game that even lets you create a multiplayer session, so that you can coordinate with other parents and the kids can play the game together. It’s a simple, but quite addictive game. The player has 3 other cats to race, which will be played by the computer or their friends, and a series of balls with words written on them make up a ‘track’ for a race to get to the comfy couch first.
As words are read aloud, the player must select the right word from one of the 4 balls in front of their kitten and choosing correctly causes the kitten to hop to the next ball.
It does a great ob of making learning fun, so if you would like to give it a whirl yourself to evaluate it, you can play Kitten Hop on Wordgametime’s website.
Snowball Fight
Snowball Fight adds a little chilly fun to sight word learning. In the game, the player is a bear that is facing 3 other bears, hidden behind a ‘snow fort’ in a fast-paced snowball fight… or at least, that’s how it looks for your child. In front of each bear, a word is listed, and when it is read aloud your child must select the proper word to throw a snowball at that bear.
Selecting the wrong word, however, results in the bear throwing a snowball BACK. While the bears move a little faster as the game progresses, it doesn’t actually matter if the bear is still hiding behind the fort – the right word will get that bear a snowball right in the face. It’s all theatrics to keep your child learning and having fun and at the end of each game the correct answers are totaled and a rating is given.
It’s clean, wholesome fun, and if you would like to take a look at Snowball Fight for yourself to see if it might be a good fit, then you can click to visit Fun4thebrain’s site to play this game.
Dolch Sight Word Bingo
Dolch Sight Word Bingo takes the classic game of ‘Bingo’ and uses it to make sight words into a session of interactive fun. Your child can select a 3×3, 4×4, or 5×5 grid and the sight word levels will go up to 3rd grade, so that you have a little control over the degree of challenge.
Once the grid has been selected, then the game begins, and words are read aloud and muse be selected to win a ‘bingo bug’ in the space that the word is occupying.
Choosing an incorrect word will cause the game to move on to the next sight word, which will be in a different location on the grid, so there is a little motivation to get it right in order to create a solid line across the card and win the game with a ‘Bingo’.
If you would like to try Dolch Sight Word Bingo, you can visit ABCYa’s website and check it out.
Sight Word Safari
Sight Word Safari is a cute little game that allows your child to select a boy or girl to drive their jeep on an African safari. Once a character has been selected, then the jeep will drive up to a series of animals in groups of 3.
Each animal is animated and has a word on them, which comes from the Dolch or Fry list, and when the word is read aloud then the child must select the animal with the correct word. Incorrect choices are tallied and cause the remaining animals to frown, but once the right one is picked then the jeep moves on to the next group.
At the end of each session, your child gets to pick a companion animal to go with them on their next safari. Selections may be made with a mouse or even a touchscreen, so this is one that your child can play on a tablet if they like!
If your child loves animals, then be sure to check out Sight Word Safari.
Sight Word Smash
Like ‘Sight Word Safari’, Sight Word Smash offers a sight word game at kindergarten and first grade levels which may be played with a mouse or a touchpad, but rather than choosing sight word animals children will be playing a game that is very similar to ‘Tetris’ – without the frustrating pace, of course.
Starting off, a pile of blocks is shown, and while the first incorrect answer will bring another block tumbling down, the game only does this to raise a little tension – there is no fear of incorrect answers actually flooding the screen with blocks, it’s pretty much just for show.
When the right word is selected, then the brick in question becomes ‘smashes’ but still stays in the same location, until one solid horizontal line of words has been smashed. A cute little bird flies overhead during the game to help keep things light and the occasional extra brick just helps to simulate a little pressure without overdoing things.
If you would like to give this game a test drive to see if it might be a good fit for your child, then click this link to play Sight Word Smash.
Outer Space Sight Words
Outer Space Sight Words is designed for kindergarten level and unlike the other games we’ve listed so far, it doesn’t keep score. Starting off, words are displayed in a ‘space’ scene, and selecting incorrect answers will get you an ‘uh oh, try again’, and too many wrong answers will get a green circle over the word eventually so that the child may progress.
From the words in space, the level that follows is sentence completion, with the sentence read aloud and the words choices listed below. On completing these two levels, Outer Space Words will complete and another sight words game from the TinyTap website is selected, such as ‘Pete the Cat and his 4 groovy buttons’.
While it’s a quick game, the lack of scoring takes out the sense od urgency, which may be appealing to parents who want a game that does the job but doesn’t make things into a competition. The shuffling of games is also appealing for young attention spans, so that they won’t get bored easily while they are learning their sight words.
To give Outer Space Sight Words a try, you can visit the game on TinyTap’s website.
Spell the Sight Word
While it’s not very fancy, ‘Spell the Sight Word’ offers a little beginner’s spelling to go with sight word practice that you can assist your child with to make it a little more personal.
To start the game, a ‘play’ button is presented, with 3 letter blocks listed below it, and blanks which are filled when letters are selected. Clicking ‘play’ will cause the game to read the sight word aloud and then the child must spell it.
Words are kept simple – such as ‘in’, ‘as’, or ‘of’, and if the word is spelled incorrectly then an explanation is provided, along with samples, which you may read aloud to your child in order to help explain the word and how it is used.
As we said, it’s not very flashy, but for parents who like to make sure that they are right there with their child on the ‘front line’ of learning, it’s a great way to spend a little time together and to start building on budding spelling skills and sight words.
You can visit IXL Learning’s website and play ‘Spell the Sight Word’ here or simply check it out to see if you like what it has to offer!
Starfall Sight Words
Starfall offers a number of games if you join their website, but they have a freebie sight words game called “Make a Match” that your child can play and it teaches sight words while also flexing those important memory muscles!
When a child starts the game, they’ll see the word ‘You’ with a play button next to it, and selecting the play button brings up a list of 12 cards, each with a star on the back of it. The game is played by selecting 2 cards, which reveal a word on the other side, after which they are quickly turned back over.
It’s basically a child’s version of the ‘Memory card matching game’. As matching pairs are selected, scored is kept by completed sets at the bottom of the page, and the game has multiple levels through which your child may progress if they are enjoying the game.
It’s a little trickier than many of the other games here, but if you like the idea of teaching sight words while also sharpening your child’s memory in the bargain you can give Starfall’s Sight Words game a try on the Starfall website!
Teach Your Monster to Read
Teach your monster to read requires signing up with a login, but it’s definitely worth it! There’s a lot of love that’s been put into the game and it includes a cute little story to get your child’s attention and a bit of interaction with friendly characters and animals to keep it.
Once you create a login to start the game, your child can enter their name, and then a page is displayed that allows them to create their own unique monster. This part is fun, as your child can select the number of eyes, the kind of teeth, and other spooky traits to really make the monster their own.
Once that is done, then the story begins, and it finds the child’s monster piloting a spaceship on a mission of exploration, during which an accident occurs that causes the ship to plummet down to an alien planet where the monster finds themselves in trouble – they need to fix the ship, but they can’t read the instruction manual!
An alien tree offers to help the monster to learn to read the manual and repair their ship, but they are going to need your child and their monster’s help to get back the letters that they’ll need to translate the repair manual.
From there on out, things get fun and weird, as your child is introduced to sounds that make up specific sight words, so that the sight word learning is build with a solid foundation of sounds and your child is having fun along the way. This game is much more complex than the others that we’ve listed here so far and it’s really quite delightful – but don’t take our word for it.
You can see experience ‘Teach your monster to read’ firsthand by clicking this link to visit the TeachYourMonster website and while you are there, you can check out some of their other learning games if you find those monsters as endearing as we did!
Tell A T-Rex
Phonics is really the way to go when learning to read and ‘Tell a T-Rex’ uses it in their own unique little sight word learning game. Starting off, you or your child can select a sound, such as ‘oy’, ‘ay’, and many others on an extensive list on the opening page.
Once you have, then the game begins, with a Tyrannosaurus on the right side of the page and a little truck that rolls in with serious or silly questions written on it that you child must answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to.
A serious question for the ‘ay’ sound might be ‘Is it safe to play in the road?’, while a more silly one for the ‘ay’ sound might be ‘Can cats live in space?’. Answering incorrectly will earn a gentle ‘try again’, while getting the answer right will toss a piece of meat to the Tyrannosaurus, who happily gobbles it down.
The phonics list is designed for year one players and the game is mobile friendly, so if your child likes dinosaurs then this phonics-based sight words game might be just the thing for getting in a little fun practice.
To try Tell A T-Rex you can visit ICT game to play it here.
Out of Sight Words
In Out of Sight Words, children must read the sight word presented in 1 of 10 different stages and select the appropriate image that represents the word. Stages are varied to keep things both interesting and cute, with stage names including such lovely titles as “Queenly Home”, “Cow Tour”, “Birthday Bash”, and “Buggy Cup”.
“Buggy Cup’ is the first stage and selecting this starts the game, which then displays a list of 10 words that are listed below an illustration of a giant cup, filled with water, which has windows on the outside and two dogs riding a bug that’s walking on top of the cup’s contents.
Play consists of your child picking words from the list to read aloud and then selecting the corresponding location on the image. For instance, ‘water’ might be one of the words, and so clicking the mouse on the water inside the cup counts as a correct answer and crosses ‘water’ off of the list.
Incorrect answers simply produce no response at all from the game, keeping things casual and cute, rather than negative and competitive.
If you would like to give Out of Sight Words a try, then you can visit it directly on ABCYa’s website.
Conclusion
We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this list as much as we have in making it! Each of these games were tested and we’ve tried to include an assortment, so that you will have a good selection of games to choose from to fit your preferred style and approach.
Just be sure to set a time limit, of course. After all, games are all the more sweeter when you’ve placed some parental limits on them to make them so, and there’s nothing quite like the joy of seeing your children looking forward to their next learning sessions – even if they are a bit ‘sugar-coated’!