What To Do Before You Teach Sight Words

Are you a new teacher? Part of your language arts curriculum could require you to teach sight words. These sight words are usually a list of words deemed appropriate by your school, district or country, for your grade. Different lists include: Dolch™, Frys ™, and the Common Exceptions lists. While there are benefits to teaching sight words, they were the bane of my teaching when I first started. All I saw was a random list of words. I won’t rant, but, “sight words” might mean something different to you. So that we are on the same thinking path, let’s define sight words as a “group of words that children recognize without the need to decode (ie, they do not need to sound out). Much like their name, they see it and say it almost instantaneously. So then, as a new teacher, in order to teach sight words to students, we were advised to get our children to memorize them. Hopefully you are not told that today.

Really? I need to get 5 and 6 yr olds to memorize up to 100 words? Are you crazy? Could I memorize 100 new words in 10 months? Probably not, maybe. In our current state of education, should children be required to memorize random words. Memorize, no, but teach them to think about language, yes. Sight words don’t have to be a big bad word or term. But first, find out what your school requires for you to teach, whether it be sight words or high frequency words.

Are Sight Words and High Frequency Words the Same?

Almost. High frequency words are the most commonly used words in a given age range. For example, some high frequency words for six year olds include: a, be, can, did, for, get, with the largest words being: number, people, please. The high frequency words turn into sight words when a child can read those high frequency words without sounding out (as mentioned above). So then the next question is, what is the easiest way for children to make words transition from high frequency to sight words? Glad you asked!

Firstly, the answer is not, make them memorize the list! During a school year, I will only ask students to memorize words a handful of times. Yes, there are words that we truly consider to be “heart words (to memorize by heart)”. If someone tells you that the English Language is hard and there are too many words to memorize, they do not understand the English language and/or word morphology.

The English language is rich and full of depth. But it has rules that many teachers really do not understand or know. I was teaching four or five years before I was taught this. I will provide some resources if you want to pursue that path.

But in order to teach children to turn high frequency words into sight words, there are pre-requisites that should be in place, or mostly in place.

What are the pre-requisites to teaching sight words?

• single letter sounds

Then These Will Help Develop Word Learning

• digraphs & blends
• spelling rules/patterns for the word
• morphology (study of word structures)

Let’s look at some words from the Pre-Primer Dolch™ list (see coded list below):

• many can be decoded as they are formed with single letter sounds (ex: and, up, not, big, red) Some teachers would argue that “go, me, we, too, is” cannot be sounded out but that isn’t correct. Many vowels have 2 or 3 different sounds (as does the letter s). Are we teaching all the single letter sounds. There are currently 44 sounds for the 26 single letters.
• words that have digraphs (two or more letters making a new sound), which need to be taught beforehand (ex: three, see, you, look, down, play)
• spelling rules apply to words such as find, little, make, blue
• word structures apply to words such as two, one
• which leaves us with two “heart” words: the, said – BUT there is a history behind these words

Once your students know at least 80% of the first letter sounds (some letters represents up to 4 sounds), you can teach students how to read a lot of words!

Sending the whole list home and asking parents to get students to memorize them is often futile. Yes, a couple students will do it, but a high percentage of your students will not be able to memorize them. They are too random.

Teach them according to their digraphs, beginning sounds, etc. Reinforce them in class (see next blog post) and then send them home, maybe 5-10 at a time.

You will have more success that way!

Resources To Consider:

Youtube: Logic of English

IG: Droppin’ Knowledge with Heidi (primary focus), Campbell Creates Readers (lower/intermediate)

UFLI: Toolbox

Happy Teaching!

Lori-Anne