About this activity
Forty Dolch pre-primer sight words — a, and, away, big, blue, can, come, down, find, for, funny, go, help, here, I, in and the rest. These are the highest-frequency words in early text, and several of them cannot be decoded by the rules a beginning reader has learned, which is why they are taught by sight.
How to use it in a session
Run them fast and keep the deck small. Sight words are about automatic recognition, so a word that takes three seconds to sound out has not been learned yet even when the answer is right. Split the forty into sets of eight and work one set to fluency before adding the next — forty at once produces recognition of none. Eight minutes covers a set with several passes.
What to listen for
Watch for decoding rather than recognition. A child who sounds out c-o-m-e is reading, which is good, and has not yet made it a sight word — and come is one that decoding will get wrong anyway. Notice which words are confused with each other: here and where, come and some, for and from are the pairs that recur.
Carrying it home
Sight words are worth five minutes rather than twenty. A set of eight cards flashed quickly, twice a day, does more than a long session once a week — frequency matters more than duration for automaticity.
Questions
- What ages is this for?
- Kindergarten and first grade, at the beginning of reading.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all forty cards play with no account and no card.
- Why teach these by sight rather than decoding?
- Because several of them do not follow the rules a beginning reader knows — come, one, they — and because they appear so often that automatic recognition frees attention for the rest of the sentence.