My niece is in first grade. She has always loved to listen
to stories, but when we were together to celebrate Christmas at my parents’
house this year, she was reluctant to read books herself. When I finally
convinced her to read with me, it was clear why: While she knows her letter
sounds cold, nearly every word was a struggle. Sure, she recognized words like “the”
and “is” with good automaticity. But she needed to sound out lots and lots of
common words (like, well, lots) every time she came across them. A big part
of the problem, I saw, was with sight words.
Other educators say that sight words are simply common words
that kids should recognize immediately because they occur so frequently in
texts that sounding them out each time would be laborious (as my niece
discovered). Words like “her”, “get”, and “open” are examples of words like
this: they “follow the rules” and occur frequently.
Regardless of the definition one uses, sight words are
important, and knowing how to read and spell them without much conscious
thought or effort is enormously helpful to young students. Luckily, there are
lots of ways to make learning sight words fun.
Over the next few posts, I’ll share some ideas that I’ve
found to be very useful, even with severely dyslexic students. Stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment