Should I teach my child sight words

What a beautiful world!

Yes, teaching sight words plus the ABC letter names and basic letter sounds gives your child the strongest tools for success. Aa apple, Bb bear are examples of basic sounds.

Being instant gives your child a huge boost - being slow will slow a child's advancement.

 

Do not panic, start today and build. Sit down with any story and your child. Start with the, put your child's finger under the. Help your child read the as you read the story. 

Once your child sees and reads the without your help, target the word of. Now you are asking your child to read the and of.

(First ten sight words: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it.) 

All sight word lists are the same, no matter the name: instant words, high frequency, Dolch, Fry, etc.  Words are listed by frequency seen in print - not level of difficulty. About 300 sight words make up 65% of all print. The more words your child knows "on sight" the better.

Words like lion, cat, dog have easy meanings and can be sounded out. Kids learn them rapidly. They are not sight words. Sight words are service words which have vague meanings and look alike to children: these, those, there, their, they're, why, who, which, where, etc.  Parents have to help. Learning them in stories is the fastest way to build a strong collection.

The brain likes to have its search and find actions accomplished in 1 / 1000th of one second.   

One full second is a lot of brain time. Your child's working memory will soar when you help your child love sight words -- not pressure to be fast -- instead the confidence of being sure. Put up a list of your child's sight words on the frig, then add to the list.

Credit for this research goes to educators Thorndike, Fry, and Dolch. Later on, Alan Baddeley did research into how long a thought stays in the mind before it starts to vanish. A thought starts to fade and is gone in one and one-half seconds.  This is why you have to keep repeating a phone number until you use it or write down the number.

I use eBay as my website, people trust it. Search: Instant Reading Help. All my books will pop up. Included are a clear list of the tricky phonics rules, plus a one page collection of the most troublesome look alike sight words. The 300 sight words are practiced in animal stories, and taught in the same order used by schools. 

Help your child have fun reading! Best wishes, Mary Maisner