Phonics should always be the main focus of reading instruction, but it’s important to give students exposure to sight words. However, you would teach the word “the.” Sounding out the word “the” won’t lead you to the correct pronunciation. In recent years there has been a push from the Science of Reading advocates to only teach true sight words that can’t easily be decoded.įor instance, you wouldn’t teach the word “am” because it can be sounded out.
Some schools/districts come up with their own combination of words as well. Many language arts curriculums have their own list of sight words.
On both top 100 lists, there are 130 words with 70 of them being on both lists. Both of these lists were created based on the most frequently occurring words in the English language. The two most common sight word lists to use are either Fry or Dolch. When writing, students should sound out words to make a sentence, but sight words that have been taught should be spelled correctly. The goal with sight words is to have the students automatically recognize the words by themselves, and within a sentence. After that, they are reinforced in small groups. Sight words are usually taught during whole group instruction. Sight word practice can be challenging, especially in kindergarten! To cement the recognition and spelling of sight words into students’ memory they need lots of varied practice.
