Sight Words

I teach sight words by combining different reading specialists' advice into one method, and so far it's working like a charm! It's fairly standard for reading and spelling curriculum to teach with BLUE CONSONANTS and RED VOWELS. Therefore many of our resources are already color coded that way, and I decided to stay consistent with that by writing our sight words this way. I write them on a LARGE index card. I position the cards in such a way that the child has to look UP and TO THE LEFT with his eyes while keeping his head facing straight ahead. This causes the child to "cross the mid-line" of his brain, so he's utilizing his right and left brain at the same time. The children REVIEW THEIR SIGHT WORDS DAILY until they prove mastery. Then we pick four more sight words to learn. Here is an example:

Three of these four sight words were picked as words to learn after an evaluation was given. I use a "Most Common Words" list from our reading and spelling curriculum. My children have to be able to 1) read the sight word, 2) orally spell the sight word correctly and 4) write the sight word correctly. (Just because a child can spell a word orally does not mean he can spell it correctly on paper. These are two different brain processes, and children need to be able to do both correctly.) If they cannot do all three of those things with a word, the word becomes a word we focus on. The fourth word was chosen because my child asked to add it out of a desire to be able to spell it correctly while writing which I thought was super cool because that means there is a desire to do well and spell correctly.

All of the cards are stored in an index card box and filed alphabetically. Each child gets their own box and their own set of cards.

This is what works for us!