Sight Words Play Mats

Recently I taught a lesson on subatomic particles to some 9th graders.  As part of the lesson I made a bunch of mats to represent places in the orbitals. They took me a while to put together, so I needed to come up with something else to do with them.  Hence, the Sight Words Play Mats.

To make the mats I cut some $2 shower curtain liners into squares.   Then I used a few colors of duct tape to make borders around each square.  Then I used a big roll of masking tape to put a word on each side of the mat.    I figured the masking tape would be easy to switch out for harder words later.  For now I mostly used sight words and prepositions.

Xander wanted to help out.

Showing off his mats.

We played a few ways.  I put out a bunch of the mats and had him jump, hop, and skip to different words.  In this picture he is attempting to stand on one foot on "because."

Then I put them all out in a big "snake."  He would call out a word then jump on it, working his way around the snake.  Since there were words on both sides, I could just flip over each mat when he made it through them all.  Of course, he had me play too.

I could see tossing balls or shooting darts on them.  What ideas can you think of?