Sight word recognition is a powerful skill for learners to have because it’s one of the most effective tools to build confident and successful readers!
What are Sight Words?
Sight words are high frequency words that show up in reading materials. In fact, sight words make up the majority of the words we read, and they are either difficult to sound out or cannot be illustrated. Imagine not recognizing the word ‘to’, ‘the’, or ‘come.’ Those are not words that can be easily illustrated or decoded. So for a child still in the early reading stages, using other reading strategies becomes difficult… and potentially discouraging.
Sight word recognition is crucial for building confident and successful readers. The more success a child experiences while reading, the more confident they will become. Since they can recognize and understand more than half the words, they will have more confidence to attempt the larger, harder ones!
The Dolch Sight Words List
The Dolch Sight Words list is the most recognized and commonly used list of sight words. The list contains 220 words, and 95 nouns that children will come across most while reading children’s books. In fact, they represent 80% of the words they will see! Once they recognize these words, reading will become much easier. Which leaves room for more laughing and learning!
The Dolch Sight Words list is divided into groups based on grades, beginning with pre-kindergarten, and ending at third grade.
Teaching Sight Word Recognition
So how do we teach sight words? Like all teaching, we want to make sure it’s engaging, fun, and hands-on. When learners connect with the material on more than one level, they are more likely to retain the information.
While some recommend mastering sight words as the learner progresses through grade levels, others encourage teaching and mastering the entire list by the end of first grade! Whichever side of the spectrum you fall on, I encourage you to teach sight word recognition based on your learner’s interest, needs, and abilities.
Remember, before your learner can successfully master sight words, they should be able to confidently recognize and name both upper and lower case letters.
When teaching a child to master sight words, it’s best to use different strategies so that they have ample opportunities to be successful and to demonstrate their learning.
The traditional method for teaching sight words is the ‘See and Say Method.’ This is generally done with flashcards, where the learner sees the word, the adult says the word, and then learner repeats until they are confident enough to say the word without the help of the adult.
To track the words that a learner is able to recognize, teachers assess the reader’s sight word recognition skills on different occasions using different assessments.
Laughing & Learning with Sight Words
While there are benefits to the traditional ‘See and Say Method’ here are some more fun and engaging ways to teach sight word recognition while laughing and learning:
- Sight Word Building
- Sight Words Bingo!
- Sight Word Tic Tac Toe
- Sight Word Squat
- Sight Word Go Fish
- Sight Word Memory
- Sight Words Roadway
- Sight Words Dominoes
- Sight Word War
And that’s just to name a few!
Keep checking back for more fun and engaging ways to teach sight word recognition while laughing and learning! Or comment below and tell me how you teach sight words to your little learner.
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