Sight Words
Being able to recognize sight words is an important skill to me for several reasons.
- Most sight words are high-frequency words they will encounter often .
- Most sight words are hard for young children to spell phonetically.
- Most are hard to illustrate which makes them difficult to teach and harder even to understand.
The most common list of sight words used in schools is the Dolch List. I utilize this list often in my own home classroom, giving my children an average of 3 words/week and making sure they have them completely ‘under their belts’ before moving on to new ones. The Dolch List I’ve attached below (in pdf form) break the sight words down by frequency within grade range. I find this the easiest way to make sure my children aren’t getting something ‘above their heads’. Each week I give them two of the ‘easier’ (more frequent) words and one of the ‘harder’ (not so common) words- just to challenge them a bit. After all, complacency is the enemy of study… even to preschoolers!
Leave a Reply