Some background on Outta Sight Words
Outta Sight Words started as a “scratch my own itch” type of solution. My daughter had sight words every week from school and I was having trouble keeping up with the lists to help her with them and thus she was getting behind. I first went the usual route for me and I found a Word document (labels template) and manually typed in each word from the list, printed out the sheets on card stock and then went to cutting out each card. Great! But soon I realized that this was not going to work for me as I rummaged through the 80-100 words to find the ones I needed for her. Also in true fashion for me I would remember just as we were heading out the door for our 20 minute commute to school, “We didn’t practice your sight words!” Clearly this system wasn’t going to work as my printed out sight words were too inconvenient to bring along and keep track of in my messy kids-transport van.
I was just learning iOS app development and thought, “I wonder if I can make a little flash cards app to help me with this little dilemma?” So I went to work on that (just over a year ago) and after a week my first “For my iPhone only” version was ready. I had to code just the words that she was needing to learn that week and then load it onto my phone for usage. And, it worked, there we were driving to school and she was practicing the needed sight words for that week. Yay, I wasn’t making her fall behind in school with her sight words anymore.
I received a very postitive response from Julia’s teacher which made me think about possibly re-creating the app in such a way that it could help other parents as well (because surely I wasn’t the only one of my kind to benefit from an on-the-go word practicer). To do this I would have to create it so that all the sight words lists would be preprogrammed and you could select from each list what words you would like to appear or not appear. Plus then I thought, “What if you wanted to create your own list or perhaps a teacher gives you a list of words that contain words from different lists?” Then I thought it would be great to create a way to make your own list. So off I set to face the mountain of challenges of a new developer… and now six months later to surface with Outta Sight Words.
For those that purchase and use Outta Sight Words, thank you, and I hope that it helps fill that little bit of your day with a bit more ease, shielding you from the last minute frazzle that it has helped me escape from (at least as it comes to being a successful parent in helping my children learn their sight words). Please let me know any issues you come across, any question marks that you face while using it so that I can continue to work on it to make it even better.
