Learning About Sight Words
Post written by: beagoodmom
Have you ever noticed how your kids can see “Wal-Mart” on a shopping bag and know what it says? Or how they know Aldi’s “Crisped Rice” does not say “Rice Krispies?” In learning to read, the first step is what educators call “sight words.” These are words that children understand and read as one thought, without having to figure them out. In its most basic form, they are not really words to a kid, but an image or logo. In some cases, the earliest readers will not even see the word as a series of letters, they see it as one shape, one letter of sorts. (We can ask MOM, a 30 year educator to explain more about this to us in the comments).
I found this article which discusses the importance of sight words in learning to read. It also gives ideas for practicing with sight words. According to the website “the 100 most common words actually make up about 50 percent of the material we read! The 25 most common words make up about one- third of our written material.” When you break it down like that, it seems easy to teach your child to “read” a huge sight vocabulary early. Of course they will still need to learn phonics, spelling, etc. Sight words are not a replacement for learning how words work, but they do give an early reader the confidence to figure the other things out.
February 28th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Hi, You are right in your explanation of sight words. Methods to teach reading changes every few years….(editorial… And it shouldn’t) Also each new reader learns to read differently.
Today most kids learn by using both phonics and sight. When I learned to read I learned by sight…was that because I was only taught by sight or was it because I was a sight word learner. Or was it because I was G & T??? My mother was a special ed teacher and she taught me to read before I went to school but I can’t remember learning. She also tried to teach my brother before he went to school and continued to try for ten years and was not successful. I am not G & T. (My college grades will prove that..my high school grades were good but college was very difficult for me.) The bottom line is that teacher must teach kids not a book or a system or a method. All methods must be used because all kids must read.
Many sight words are not content words. They do not conjure up a picture of something in our minds. The, a, an, these, etc. are very difficult for many children to picture in their mind.
The shape of the word is often helpful. That is why teachers use sentence strips to manuscript simple sentences that children dictate (ex: The dog sat in the puddle) after rereading it together and independently, she will cut the words apart and trim around the letters, word by word, not letter by letter. She will trim around the basement and sky letters so kids can see the shape if they need it for learning. Some will memorize all words as sight words, some will use rhyming, beginning sounds,some will use the content of the entire sentence and some will be helped by the shapes.
It will be a combination of approaches that will help kids to learn a words.
Ask me some questions, because I may not have explained this very well. I am good at teaching kids to read words but you are good at writing words and making them tell your message. LOVE MOM
February 28th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Hi, You are right in your explanation of sight words. Methods to teach reading changes every few years….(editorial… And it shouldn’t) Also each new reader learns to read differently.
Today most kids learn by using both phonics and sight. When I learned to read I learned by sight…was that because I was only taught by sight or was it because I was a sight word learner. Or was it because I was G & T??? My mother was a special ed teacher and she taught me to read before I went to school but I can’t remember learning. She also tried to teach my brother before he went to school and continued to try for ten years and was not successful. I am not G & T. (My college grades will prove that..my high school grades were good but college was very difficult for me.) The bottom line is that teacher must teach kids not a book or a system or a method. All methods must be used because all kids must read.
Many sight words are not content words. They do not conjure up a picture of something in our minds. The, a, an, these, etc. are very difficult for many children to picture in their mind.
The shape of the word is often helpful. That is why teachers use sentence strips to manuscript simple sentences that children dictate (ex: The dog sat in the puddle) after rereading it together and independently, she will cut the words apart and trim around the letters, word by word, not letter by letter. She will trim around the basement and sky letters so kids can see the shape if they need it for learning. Some will memorize all words as sight words, some will use rhyming, beginning sounds,some will use the content of the entire sentence and some will be helped by the shapes.
It will be a combination of approaches that will help kids to learn words.
Ask me some questions, because I may not have explained this very well. I am good at teaching kids to read words but you are good at writing words and making them tell your message. LOVE MOM
March 1st, 2007 at 8:36 am
[...] wrote about learning about sight words yesterday (and I just realized that the new template doesn’t show which one of us wrote a post - will [...]
March 1st, 2007 at 10:38 am
Our kindergartener is learning sight words right now. They even have a song to go with each word, so she can spell them all too. It seems backwards to me (ie I would think you should learn to sound out all the words), but it means she can read and write much faster than I would have expected her to (especially since she’s been speaking English for less than a year). And I can see how it might actually help with sounding out words if you can relate words you already know to the sounds in them, it’s probably easier to pick up new ones.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:38 am
My daughter uses sight words but I never knew there was an actual term for them.
March 4th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Thanks for posting this. Miss Turtle and I are having some issues with her sight words and I think that this will help us