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.
