Kindergarten Sight Words: Not A Good Idea.

[labellavita116]

both of my children taught themselves to read at 3 and are sight readers. Yes, I sounded out words so they did learn phonetics on the side, but it wasn't the focus. BTW, we ALL learn to read by sight. You, me. How laborious would reading be if we had to sound out every single word. We memorize words, we can read fast now. In the beginning it is a bit much to force all children to be sight readers, but many truly excel at it. I think children should be taught BOTH.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

@labellavita116 Early "sounding out" is a step, like training wheels on a bicycle. What happens is that everything speeds up; the brain dips into a word as much or as little as it needs to....Unfortunately, your usage -- "sight-readers"-- protects all the bad ideas used in public schools. They are happy to have your support as they force kids to memorize graphic designs, which almost guarantees illiteracy... I would suggest that your kids are not sight-readers at all.

actually

[darksarchasm]

Clearly there are limits to teaching with sight words, but you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You can't teach reading using only sight words.  That much is obvious. But who is suggesting that we do that? We teach sight words alongside phonics because there are common words that are not phonetic. You'd be a fool to teach "bright" as a sight word. But we teach common nonphonetic words this way because the brain can process them like clusters. There are only about 100 such words.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

@darksarchasm From 1931 to 2000, the official dogma was to teach entirely with sight-words. That's who is suggesting! All the mixed and balanced methods you are familiar with are strategic retreats, and diplomatic ploys. They are saying to the public: we aren't as insane as you thought. Oh, no, we'll allow some phonics, and we'll pretend to be the soul of reason....Google "42: Reading Resources," it has some good historical quotes from the loons who gave us 50 million functional illiterates.

[fryque]

maybe so, but if you can write or type the word Bright ten different ways; cursive, print, block, italic; then you can write or type singles letters or phonetic groupings ten different ways. It is a combination of groupings and methods that works best. Is c a k or an s? You have to learn hundreds of exceptions just to get through elementary grades.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

You or I may be able to write BRIGHT many different ways. Point is, a child can't easily do this. The difficulty of memorizing all those different looks and configurations is what renders Whole Word useless. (I've recently posted a good article titled "Nine Reading Experts Explain The Sad State of Reading...just Google that title.)

[mrob75]

Amen to this video!!!

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

A silly non-sequitur. If there are phonetic irregularities, you memorize them as such. You don't create a new sub-language of non-phonetic "sight words" that you memorize as visual symbols. It's illogical and confusing. Please also see "Sight Words--The Big Stupid" on Improve-EducationDOTorg.

[dkbossard]

I strongly support the instruction of both phonemic awareness as well as phonics. However, certain words are irregular, do not follow basic phonics rules, as a result, they need to be automatically identified. Approximately, 25% of the most frequent words used in childrens books are irregular (e.g. the, to, is, was, a, you, of the list goes on).

Try playing a board game called, Er-u-di-tion!

[homeschoolmommaof3]

The only irregular word in your list is the word "was". "The" has three letters and two phonograms; "th' and "e". "Th' has two sounds, voiced as in "the" and unvoiced as in 'think'. The phonogram 'e' has two sounds; short vowel /e/ as in 'met' and long vowel /E/ as in "the". The problem is that children are not being taught phonics properly.