Sight Words

What Are Sight Words?

Sight words are words that can be recognized by sight without using any specific strategies to figure them out. As adults, most words you read are sight words. However, Kinders who are just starting to read don’t have a plethora of sight words like us. So, as we teach our kiddos strategies for decoding news words throughout the year, we also encourage them to get to know some high-frequency words with automaticity by committing them to memory. These high-frequency words are those that are used so often in print that together they make up an estimated 75-85% of all words used in print.

Is it Really Necessary to Teach Sight Words?

You might be thinking that if these words are so common, kids probably just learn them organically through reading and other everyday print. However, many of these words cannot be decoded using conventional strategies so memorizing them until they are known by sight is beneficial. In addition, because many of these words defy standard phonetic conventions, meaning they are impossible to sound out, they are often also difficult to illustrate, so children can't use illustrations in picture books to make a deeper connection to these words. On the flip side, the wonderful thing about these words being so common is that children learn them easily with repetition because they are usually words that they already have in their everyday vocabulary.

Why is it Important for My Child to Learn Sight Words?

Working hard to learn these words by sight (memorizing) pays off. It allows kids to free up cognitive resources so they can focus on the tougher words that require strong decoding skills. They are also able to understand the majority of the text if those decoding skills fail. There is more to why sight words are important than just simply the mechanics of reading; they are also fantastic confidence boosters. One of my educational philosophies is to build children's confidence up and then present an attainable challenge. Sight-word knowledge provides a scaffold of understanding and confidence for new readers who need to use all the other tools in their toolbox to complete the job at hand: reading with understanding.