How Do You Teach Sight Words?
In the prior post, It’s true! Some Sight Words Truly are Phonetic and Here’s Why, I shared the importance of teaching sight words to ensure meaning for beginning readers. Let’s talk about how to successfully teach sight words.
Preparation:
· Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”, Part 2 has at your fingertips several sight word lists and high frequency word lists. I also love using the Fry Word List. You can download this list yourself or contact me and I will email you the list.
· Begin by assessing each child’s sight word vocabulary using one or more of the lists. Have a child read a list until he/she makes a total of 3 errors.
· Begin that day’s sight word lesson with those 3 words.
· When I am teaching individual children, I can easily teach exactly the words that each individual child needs.
· When I am teaching a whole classroom, I have different options available:
1. All children can do all of the high frequency/sight words beginning with “the”, “of”, and “and”.
2. I can divide my class into reading level groups. All children within a particular group will study the same high frequency/sight words at the same time.
3. I can have parent volunteers and/or support teachers help children individually with their own personal high frequency/sight words.
Directions:
Children write the sight words they need to learn on 4” X 6” note cards (bigger is better for young, developing eyes) in this way:
1) Children write the word in black for consonants and in red for vowels. As you teach the other colors (such as orange wiggly lines for consonant digraphs), have them also use the other colors on the cards.
2) You also make the same word card for children in your handwriting using red and black (and the other colors when children are ready).
3) On the children’s personal cards, have them draw a picture to help them remember the word. An example word is “come”— have them draw something that is meaningful to them, such as draw a dog coming to a person with that person’s hand signaling the dog to come.
4) Practice word cards every day.
5) Each day add 1 to 3 more word cards, though I never want a child to be working on more than 6 word cards on any particular day.
6) When a child can read a word with automaticity (within 1 second), turn the card over and write the word again using only black letters, so it looks like it does in print in books.
7) Practice each black-lettered card each day until the child can read it with automaticity. This is considered mastery.
8) Keep each mastered card for one month, pull it out occasionally to have the child read it. If the child still has automaticity, send the card home. If not, continue to practice the word.
9) Continually celebrate their progress in learning to read sight words with automaticity!
As children learn more and more phonics rules, point out to them that words that they once learned as “sight words” are truly phonetic words.
An example word is the word “they”. Once a child has been taught the consonant digraph sounds of “th” and taught that the vowel digraph/phonogram “ey” can make ā or ē, guide them to the understanding that “they” is actually a phonetic word.
When they ask the question, “Why did you teach this word to me as a sight word?”, I explain what I shared above, “There was no possible way for me to teach you how to read every word all at once when you were first learning to read. Since I needed you to quickly read words in sentences so that reading made sense, I needed you to quickly memorize a lot of words. As you are now learning more and more phonics rules, you are able to sound out more and more phonetic words! And, because you can now read sentences and understand what you are reading, you can understand why I taught these phonetic words as sight words. You are brilliant! I am so proud of you!”
This post and the prior post, It’s true! Some Sight Words Truly are Phonetic and Here’s Why, have clarified what a true sight word is, why it is important to teach some phonetic words as sight words in the beginning and how Silent Elephant “e” teaches sight words for mastery.
With this knowledge you are now ready to have fun teaching sight words to your children.
If you have further questions about teaching sight word vocabulary, feel free to contact us.