My daughter will sit with a coloring page longer than she sits with almost anything else. Her snack goes untouched. Her crayons end up snapped in half and scattered across the table like confetti. If I ask her to come read a few words with me, I sometimes get a sigh. If I slide a page in front of her with something to color on it, she pulls her chair in closer and asks which crayon she should start with.

For a long time I treated coloring as the break between the real learning. Then one afternoon I watched her color the same big shape three times over, a different crayon each round, talking to herself the whole way through. Nobody asked her to repeat anything. She just kept going because she was enjoying it. As a teacher, I know exactly how hard it is to get that kind of repetition out of a young child, and here she was handing it to me for free.

That little moment is a big part of why this book exists. The Dolch Primer Sight Words Workbook is now available on Amazon as a black and white paperback, and I want to tell you why I made it and how it works.

Why a black and white edition

The full color edition of this workbook came first, and I’m still proud of it. But color printing costs more, and that cost always ends up on the price tag. I kept thinking about the parent who picks up a workbook, likes it, and then quietly puts it back because the grocery bill comes first this week. I kept thinking about the teachers I know who buy materials for their classrooms out of their own pockets, and the grandparents and caregivers who want to help with reading but aren’t sure where to start.

Sight word practice shouldn’t be something only some families can afford. So I made a version that is printed entirely in black and white line art, which brings the price down. It has the same 52 words and the same activities as the color book. Nothing was cut. The only thing that changed is the ink.

Made for the kids who love to color

Here is the part I’m most excited about. Once the pages were in black and white, they stopped being just a budget choice and turned into something a lot of kids will actually love more. The line art turns so much of the book into something to color.

The Word Treasure Hunt pages are drawn in a cozy coloring book style, with friendly dinosaurs in every scene and the sight words hidden around them. Your child finds each word, says it out loud, and then gets to color the whole scene. If you have a dinosaur fan at home, you already know how long they will stare at anything with a dinosaur on it. That extra looking time is exactly what sight word learning needs.

I’ve seen this again and again in the classroom. Interest is the engine. A child who is bored will glance at a word and move on. A child who is excited about the picture will keep their eyes on the page, go back to it, point to things, and talk about what they see. When the sight word is sitting right there in the middle of all that, it gets looked at over and over without anyone having to drill it.

Coloring also slows children down in a good way. Coloring in a word means following the shape of every letter, and that careful attention helps a word start to stick. The Color to Reveal pages lean into this on purpose, with outlined words for your child to fill in.

What’s inside the book

The 52 words are organized into 13 small groups of four. I’ve watched too many children get overwhelmed when a whole list lands on them at once. Four words feels doable, even on a tired day.

Every group follows the same seven step routine, so your child always knows what comes next. You start with a Word Introduction, where you simply say the new words together. Then comes the Word Treasure Hunt, followed by Color to Reveal, Same or Different, Find the Imposter, a Word Maze, and finally reading short sentences together using the new words. By the time a child reaches the sentences, they have met each word in six different ways already, so reading it in a real sentence feels like meeting a friend rather than a stranger.

After the 13 groups, there’s a review section with I Spy and Count pages, sight word tic tac toe, Build the Word pages where your child can use counters, play dough, or small toys, and a gentle “How Are We Doing?” checklist. There’s also an alphabetical word index at the back, so if your child gets stuck on a word later on, you can flip straight back to its page.

And there is no writing in this book at all. I made it that way on purpose, because so many three and four year olds are ready to start reading long before their hands are ready to write. Your child points, finds, matches, colors, and reads. You sit beside them and say the words out loud together. That’s it.

A few thoughts on using it

If I could give one piece of advice, it would be to keep the sessions short. A few minutes at a time is plenty, and it’s much better to stop while your child still wants more than to push through until they’re done with it. There’s no finish line in this book, and no timer.

Let your child choose the crayons, and don’t worry about coloring inside the lines. The coloring is the invitation, not the lesson. What matters is that each time they color a word, they say it. You can gently model this by saying the word yourself as they work, and most children start copying you before long.

For teachers, the repeating routine works well in small groups or as a quiet morning activity, since children learn the pattern quickly. For parents and caregivers, the same routine means you don’t need any teaching experience to lead it. The instructions are right there on every page.

I built this book around what I have seen work with real children over nearly ten years of teaching, and around what I see at my own kitchen table with my daughter and her broken crayons. Calm, repeated practice, a little bit of fun, and no pressure. That is really all early reading needs.

The Dolch Primer Sight Words Workbook (Black and White Edition) is available now as a paperback on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HL4NDVQ4.

If you’d like to see more, you can find all my sight words and early reading books on Amazon, and printable activity packs for ages 3 to 6 in my Etsy shop.