Kindergarten sight word lists how to#

(Case in point: the CVC words cut and got are on the third grade list. While I do think that the Dolch and Fry word lists are helpful because they give us the most common high frequency words, the grade level lists are just ridiculous. If I could banish the Dolch grade level sight word lists, I would!

Kindergarten sight word lists how to#

Learn more in this post: How to teach sight words.

We cannot orthographically map words unless we pay attention to the letters and their sounds.Ĭonclusion = teach sight words by calling attention to their letters and sounds. When we do this enough times, we orthographically map the word into our brains so that when we see it in the future, we recognize it automatically. We learn to read by matching the sounds to the letters (sounding out words). They can only do this for so long – the brain is not able to memorize an unending number of words, because that’s not how the brain learns to read. While we may teach our students to memorize a handful of words to get them going, our goal is NOT to teach our students to memorize sight words as wholes. Why memorizing sight words isn’t a good long term strategy Our goal, then, is to turn high frequency words (words that appear often in print) INTO sight words – words our students recognize automatically without needing to sound out or guess. A sight-word vocabulary refers to the pool of words a student can effortless recognize. A quick review … what are sight words?Įven though I use the term “sight words” throughout this series to refer to high frequency words that children need to learn, it’s important to remember the true definition.Ī sight word is a word that is instantly and effortlessly recalled from memory, regardless of whether it is phonically regular or irregular. To understand why, we need to remember WHAT sight words are and HOW we learn to read them.

Unfortunately, lists of kindergarten sight words are often problematic. Many schools require kindergarten teachers to teach a long list of sight words to their kindergartners.