#RATIONALE FOR TEACHING SIGHT WORDS HOW TO#

The teacher (and possibly the students) may even write it down several times. The students may read the word and echo it back to her several times. She flashes each word card to the class, reads the word, and uses it in a sentence. It’s time for the day’s reading lesson, and more specifically, it’s “time to teach sight words.” The teacher pulls out his or her pile of flashcards and gets ready to explicitly teach this week’s three to five words that the students will focus on. (I can make that bold statement, because in the past, I have made this same mistake, too.) Let me paint a picture for you of a very typical Monday in a primary classroom. Have you heard this quote before? We can apply it to students who struggle with sight words just as much as we can apply it to our daily lives. Let’s start off by discussing one of the biggest mistakes I see teachers make while introducing and teaching sight words within the primary classroom.

#RATIONALE FOR TEACHING SIGHT WORDS HOW TO#

We will learn how to introduce sight words, how to play with sight words, and how to practice sight words. We’ll chat about what we currently do, why it may not be working, and solutions to move students forward.

Now, before I go on, it’s important to note that there can be many, many, many reasons why certain students struggle with sight words more than others. This post focuses on one of those possible reasons (a very important reason, in my opinion).

In this blog post, I’m going to share the importance of teaching sight words within context, and why it can sometimes be the difference between a student who masters his sight words, and one who does not. So why do we still have students who stare at us blankly when they come to a sight word that we know they know while reading a book? Since I have gotten to know you, my readers, pretty well over the past six years, I can even confidently assume we are all teaching sight words on a daily basis within our classrooms. Clearly, we know sight words are a core part of our literacy instruction as teachers. In addition, the child also frees up time and energy to focus on the text’s meaning, resulting in increased comprehension and prosodic reading (intonation, phrasing, and expression). When sight words can be read automatically, students can spend more time on decodable text and phonetic patterns, therefore increasing fluency skills. Sight word recognition improves both fluency and comprehension. Since sight words make up 50%-75% of all text, we know that being able to recognize and read sight words quickly and effortlessly is a critical skill for life-long readers. In fact, most teachers can think of several students whose sight word recognition skills have taken a toll on his or her overall reading success. The educational establishment (professors in Teacher Colleges, the International Literacy Association, the National Council of Teachers of English) responded with Balanced Literacy.If you are a primary teacher, you can probably think of a student in your classroom who struggles with sight word identification. National Reading Panel (NRP) condemned Whole Language by name, and in its place, called for systematic phonics. Learning by personal 'discovery' rather than by direct instruction from a well-trained teacher. EZ for 'easy' RM for 'arm' LFN for 'elephant') This resulted in spelling by letter names rather than letter sounds (e.g. Word-guessing based on pictures, or context, or the word’s first letter.Įarly writing using “invented” spelling. Phonics instruction, if it did occur, was unsystematic, and was taught only as a last resort.

This immersion was supposed to lead, easily and naturally, to reading - just as earlier in the child's life, immersion in conversation led to speaking. This was in opposition to the artificial Dick and Jane readers of the 40s, 50s, and 60s in the US ( Janet and John in the UK, John and Betty in Australia).

Rationale for teaching sight words