In his book Equipped for Reading Success, Dr. David Kilpatrick explains the mental process we use to permanently store words for immediate retrieval. This process is called Orthographic Mapping. It is how we take an unfamiliar word and immediately turn it into a sight word.
In order for students to become “good mappers” Kilpatrick says they must develop three skills: 1) automatic letter-sound associations, 2) highly proficient phoneme awareness, and 3) word study.
He believes that “the word-study aspect is the super-glue that anchors the words in permanent memory”. This means students need explicit instruction on how to connect phonemes (sounds) to the written word.
When trying to teach our kids to read and spell sight words we were relying on memorization and leaving out word study! It was as if we thought sight words were a special set of words that needed to be memorized and couldn’t be learned using sound symbol relationships! We were wrong!
Science now tells us that we need to integrate sight words into our phonics lessons. Students need to be taught the spelling patterns for high-frequency words so that they can “know them by heart”, thus the name Heart Words.
