Why Do Children Learn Sight Words

To improve their reading proficiency, beginning readers employ a variety of tactics. Reading and recognizing sight words is one of the most crucial strategies. Sight words are high-frequency words that novice readers learn to recognize without decoding. We’ll talk about more why children learn sight words in this article.

Rather than learning to pronounce these, students memorize the words. Sight words are a big part of training kids to read, which often begins in kindergarten.

Sight Words: What Are They?

As the name suggests, “sight words” relate to the words that appear the most frequently in a given text, which is why they’re also known as “high-frequency words.” In addition to “popcorn words,” these terms are sometimes called “core words.” They are called “popcorn words” because they tend to “pop” out of kids’ mouths whenever they are seen.

More than half of the content that kids read is made up of between 100 and 200 words.

When you consider that sight words are generally simple, easily recognizable terms like “a, I, the,” and so on, it seems improbable that this could be true.

An individual reader’s sight vocabulary is a list of words they know by sight without having to decode or analyze them.

Lists of Sight Words

Teachers use various lists to develop the correct sight words for each grade level. It’s common for teachers to add their students’ names to their sight word lists in the early grades. Although they aren’t strictly “sight words,” they are words that kids will repeatedly see in the classroom and benefit from becoming familiar with.

Since the Revised Dolch List of Basic Sight Words and Fry’s 300 Instant Sight Words contain sight words, the terms “Dolch” or “Fry” may be used to refer to these particular sight words.

There are sight words for each grade level, and they build on each other. Your child will be required to know the kindergarten terms and any new ones taught in the first grade after they have learned them. New words can be deciphered with the aid of words that youngsters have already learned. Scaffolding is a term for this method.

A Game of Sight Words

Sight word recognition can be taught at home by working with your child. Make learning sight words exciting for you and your child by playing one of the activities listed below.

• Flashcards: The allocated sight word list can be printed as flashcards, or flashcard sets recommended for different grade levels can be purchased.
• Bingo: Recognizing the letters and symbols in words. Printable bingo cards can be used, or you can create your own. Playing the game will help students learn the vocabulary, and you may give them prizes for doing well.

• Hangman: a fun game that can be played with one or many kids simultaneously.
• Word Catchers: A fly swatter with a window cut out is used in this activity. When reading with your youngster, challenge each other to see who can catch a sight word first. Choose one or more terms you want to focus on, and look up those words in a book or a newspaper.
• Beach Ball Toss: Assemble a group of children around an inflatable beach ball and write a sight word on each part before having them read the word they catch.

Other options include playing Go Fish with decks of sight word cards, memory games, bean bag toss games, and putting out sight words in a trail for the students to follow.

Final Verdict

When your child is interested in reading, you can begin reviewing sight words with them. Even if your child isn’t ready for this phase or isn’t picking up sight words as quickly as you’d want, you shouldn’t stress. There is no need to force a child to learn to read; every child learns at their rate.

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