Reading with Jen Strange

Sight Words Quote

I use Google News to view news stories in specific categories that interest me; to personalize my results I created sections with certain keywords, including "phonics" and "sight words."  Today an article came up that perfectly summarizes the problem of asking children to memorize sight words as units rather than looking at letters in words first.*

“It’s a fact that many students simply can’t learn by memorizing words and facts,” Melanie West recently discussed with a group of parents in Manhattan Beach, California. “When your child is struggling to learn, stop forced memorization and find ways that do work. Simply put, Drill and Kill doesn’t work! Children who are experiencing a slow learning rate are in fact showing you that their brains need deeper, more meaningful learning strategies.”

Misbehaving Vowels

I've mentioned before that the way I learn is by making lists.  Using colored pencils for some reason *really* helps clear things up for me.  I made this list the other day and thought I'd share.

I've been looking at lists of what some people call "sight words" (and other people would call "frequently used words") and trying to figure out logical ways to teach them to kids.  For example, rather than asking a child to memorize a bunch of words haphazardly, why not teach that when "ee" occurs together in a word, it's usually going to represent the /ee/ sound, such as in the words see, tree, green.  

Usually when I finish these lists, I'm left with a bunch of oddball words that really don't fit anywhere.  This list contains a lot of those words.

I assigned each vowel its own color (we're assuming here the "short" vowel sounds, plus the two "oo" sounds - "ugh" and "ooh," as I tell my kids.)  You'll see that the words BESIDE each vowel are different colors - take the U section.  The blue words have the /u/ sound but are spelled with an "o" (blue is O's color.)  The red words are spelled with "a" (red is A's color.)

This chart is mostly for my own reference, not necessarily to use with a student - but who knows, it might come in handy later.

P.S. this list doesn't cover ALL occurances of these types of words, just the ones from the lists I was looking at (plus a few words that occured to me as I was writing.)

McGuinness on Sight Words

Right now I'm reading Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It - the author, Diane McGuinness, is also the author of Growing a Reader From Birth, one of my three "must read" suggestions for all parents.  Why Our Children Can't Read is a bit harder to read than Growing a Reader - it's very scientific and written at what I'd say is early college reading level - but it's so, so fascinating.  I just read something she has to say about sight-words, and it had me standing up and cheering:

Sight words were originally defined as words with such irregular spellings they had to be memorized "by sight."  Later, memorizing all words by sight became the major mode of learning to read in whole word approaches, especially "look-say."  Phonics programs and most reading textbooks also advocate teaching a large group of "sight words."  Here, the rationale shifts to the "getting started" theory.  Children should learn sight words, it is claimed, because they can start reading "right away," and this is motiviating.  Thus, sight words are taught prior to learning the alphabet code or concurrently with learning the code.  Teaching sight words this way can have profoundly negative consequences on the child's fragile understanding of the alphabetic principle.

YUP.

Context:
alphabetic principle: the idea that letters work together as symbols to form, in writing, the words which represent speech, and that this process is predictable and reliable.  The alphabetic principle is the foundation of any written language.
alphabetic code:  the idea that certain letters or combinations of letters typically represent certain sounds.  (Example, the letter t should almost always represent the /t/ sound.)  In basic code, each letter is assigned one sound.  Advanced alphabetic code explores alternative spelling representations.  (The word "pig" is a basic code word.  The word "giraffe" requires knowledge of advanced code.)

Making it up as I go along

So for me, the most helpful skill I have for one-on-one teaching is the ability to think on my feet (and, by extension, create games off the top of my head.)  For instance, this week when I was working with 1st grade "K" on certain sight-words she needed to review for school, she acted bored with they ways we had previously worked with sight-words.  Deciding to let her have a say in the matter, I grabbed a piece of paper, a Sharpie, the two Littlest Pet Shop hamsters she likes to use for games, and some M&Ms.

On the fly games

Last night I was working with my 1st grade student "K" - her mom asked me to review a list of 20 sight words her teacher would be testing her on today.  She also said the teacher told her K was having trouble sounding out words . . . which left me thinking LADY, that's because you keep asking her to memorize sight words!!!! 

(I know she's most likely obligated to just follow curriculum, so it's not the teacher I'm annoyed with as much as the process.)

With many children who are trying to learn to read, every time you bypass sounding words out in favor of memorizing strings of letters, you are sending that child's learning process backwards.  Then when you try to switch back to sounding words out, the child is so confused by the guesswork involved with sight-words, she isn't sure what to do!  (This is where my theory about learning basic alphabetic code FIRST, THEN talking about sight words LATER comes from.  That's what I go on and on about in my ebook.)

ANYWAY.

Spelling "does"

The other day I was reviewing spelling words with my friend Aowyn, who is in 2nd grade.  She was having a heck of a time with the word "does."  (She was trying to remember the string of letters, rather than listening for the sounds.)

First I told her - let's stop and listen for the sounds.  That will give us a good start.  "Does" starts with a d, has the /u/ sound in the middle (that's the confusing part!), then ends with /s/ or /z/, depending on pronounciation.  (She has an understanding of /s/ and /z/ intermixing, so we didn't have to dwell on that.)  So based on that we at least know we're beginning with a d and ending with a s.

It then dawned on me that rather than explain o and e working together to represent /u/ (because in what reality does THAT make sense?), I could explain the root of the word.

Sight Word Activity - Circle the Word

This is another activity I did last week with "K", whose 1st grade class is tested weekly on memorizing sight words.  (Read my thoughts on that here.)  Because she doesn't understand basic alphabetic code yet, she has no clue how to approach sight words.  She mostly tries to guess based on a word's first letter, or by how long a word is.

This, friends, is not reading.  And prolonging this stage by throwing more sight-words to be memorized at her is doing much more damage than good.

To encourage her to look at the individual letters in each word, I wrote some similar words in pairs - the words start with the same letter, and are usually similar lengths.  I let her choose each time which pair of letters to work with (children who have attention and/or defiance issues do better when they get to make choices) and then said something like, "These words both begin with M.  Let's circle the word 'mat.'" 

Sight Word Activity - Spinner

First, a word about "sight-words."

To say that I dislike the pressure Kindergarten and 1st graders are under to memorize sight words is a severe understatement.  It makes me really angry.  I have a LOT to say about sight words, but in the interest of time I'll just repeat my main objection: to ask a child to memorize a string of letters BEFORE that child has learned the SOUNDS each letter represents is absurd.  At least give the kid a fighting chance and PRETEND to teach phonics before sight-words!

Ok, so I'm frustrated.  :)  One of my 1st grade students (K) is still working to understand the names and sounds of letters, yet is being tested weekly on memorizing sight words.  My main focus when working with her is to teach her basic alphabetic code and to help her to understand how reading works.  But I also am at the mercy of her school, so I work in some sight-word work, too.

Spelling Test Confusion

File this under: problems that sight-word focused teaching can cause.

Yesterday I was helping my friend's middle daughter study for her first spelling test of second grade. Aowyn is a very bright kiddo, but was struggling with the words a bit.  I asked her how to spell "job." (Then I used the word in a sentence involving a chicken - which is a silly thing I always do with my kids - "The chicken doesn't have a job!") 

Aowyn thought for a moment and said "J . . . O . . . (sigh) I always get confused between 'job' and 'joy.'"