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.'"
If she wasn't sure about the words she was looking at, I would point to each letter in a word and say the letter sounds. So for the "my / mat" pair, I would say "Right here I see /m/ /a/ /t/, and right here I see /m/ /ie/."
You would think that sounding the words out FOR her is defeating the purpose. But even when I sound out the words, the activity reinforces important skills:
- she's listening to my example of how to sound out words based on their letters
- she's still having to blend those sounds together to make a word
- she's paying close attention as I demonstrate that when reading a word, we look at how the individual letters work together
- she's visually seeing the words as she figures out how the sounds come together
- she's physically circling one word and erasing the other, while holding the word names in her mind after we have figured out which one is which
This is one activity among many I would do with a student in the course of our session. Activities like this can take as little as 2 minutes, and then we'd move on to something else. This is an example of identifying a specific learning goal (i.e., K has a test this week on certain sight words), and developing a short activity to reivew the skills needed in an interesting way.
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