Fishing for Letters with {FREE} Fish Letters & Sight Words

The Virtual Book Club's is focusing on a Boat Theme this week, and we're kicking off with a fishing boat letter and sight word activity! You could also do this with a lake theme, ocean theme, or fish theme!

In my head, I thought this would be fun to do with those plastic magnetic letters, but I couldn't find any! It's funny how things disappear sometimes. In a slightly stubborn mood, I refused to go buy more because I'm sure one of these days they will turn up! In the meantime, however, I decided to make some fish with letters and sight words on them. You could stick a paperclip on each fish, but I wanted ours to stick to the door too, so I flipped them over and put a piece of magnetic tape on each fish:

We made a little cardboard "boat," but it only lasted a few turns...then we just "fished" out of the basket!

We are working on letter recognition and sounds with one of my preschoolers and sight words with an older child, so I made a set of fish with letters and one with sight words. I like to use Fry's Sight Word lists because the first 25 words on it make up about 30% of the words your child is likely to encounter in their reading. That's a great way to build reading confidence!

After we went "fishing" we used the letters to spell words, names, and more...really, you can use them for any kind of letter or sound activity!

For our first Boat Theme day, we read the book Toy Boat by Randall de Seve, made a fishing boat, and went fishing for letters. I already had a "fishing pole," but you can make one easily by taping a magnet to a piece of yarn and tying the other end of the yarn to a wooden dowel, stick, or pencil. As the kids pulled in a fish, they "read" the letter and we all named words that started with that letter. If they pulled in a word, we all made silly sentences with that word!

I am absolutely in love with the book Toy Boat! It is already inspiring soooo many fun activities...hopefully I will have time to write about them all! The best part is that the kids are thinking of their own projects, like making a boat like the boy's!

Amazon Affiliate Link for Toy Boat: