kindergarten sight words free printable worksheets

We shouldn’t be sending home lists of 50 “sight words” for our kindergartners to master.

I don’t think it’s wrong to teach kids to read words using those lists as a reference, but we need to approach it a different way. So what does this tell us about the big sight word lists … like Dolch and Fry? Then we teach learners to learn the tricky parts by heart. We call attention to the parts of the word that are phonetic (and there’s usually at least 1-2 of them). What about sight words that aren’t regular, like the? We teach them to sound out words, even sight words. We need to teach children to identify individual sounds in words and then connect those sounds to letters. In order for us to read words and then store them for future retrieval, we must be able to match the phonemes (sounds) to the graphemes (letters). Orthographic mapping is the process we use to store printed words in long-term memory. Stick with me … I promise it’s not as complicated as it sounds. How do we move from sounding out words letter by letter, to recognizing thousands and thousands of words instantly? It’s through a mental process called orthographic mapping. They do this so quickly and effortlessly that it takes a tiny fraction of a second to identify each word. Instead, they (very, very quickly) connect the letters to the sounds in each word. Researchers have discovered that strong readers do not call upon thousands of pictures of words in their brains. We are not trying to get students to cram pictures of words in their brains, because there’s a limit to how many words any of us can remember by sight.

This doesn’t fit with how the brain learns to read. So should we get lists of sight words and get our students to memorize them using flash cards?

A sight-word vocabulary refers to the pool of words a student can effortlessly recognize.

However, reading researchers have a different definition of sight words.Ī sight word is a word that is instantly and effortlessly recalled from memory, regardless of whether it is phonically regular or irregular. We often define sight words as words that kids can’t sound out – words like the, for example. Phonics Test For Grade 1 Pdf.Traditionally, when teachers say “sight words,” they are referring to high frequency words that children should know by sight.

Kindergarten sight words free printable worksheets