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.
This issue is not K's fault. She's doing the best she can with what she is exposed to. So in addition to the phonics work I always do with her, we worked in those 20 sight words.
I keep a stash of cut-up index cards for on-the-fly activities, which comes in VERY handy. (I cut 3x5 cards in thirds - perfect for little hands!)
I wrote each word twice, then made a line of words on the floor with one set. The other set I mixed up and divided in two - K and I each got a set, which we spread out in front of us. We each picked out a Littlest Pet Shop toy to be our game pieces, and used a spinner to move forward.
When we landed on a card, we would pick up that card and sound it out together. (See what I'm doing there? Most of the words could be sounded out, but were being taught as sight-words. The words that COULDN'T easily be sounded out - "who" and "are" come to mind - I explained best I could about WHY those strings of letters happen to represent those words.) When she wasn't sure how to start with a word, I would read the letters to her first ("This word has the letters W I L L"), then demonstrate how to sound out the word based on those letters. Usually by then she was ready to put the sounds together for the word.
After we discovered which word we were looking at, we then looked to our individual sets of cards to see who had the match. (This helps a child both repeat the letters in the word to themselves, and to keep the "picture" of the word in their mind.) When the match was found, we put the matching cards together and turned them over. The goal of the game was to be the first to turn over all our cards. Since we were working with a line of words on the floor and the cards were removed one by one, we just went up and down each turn, landing on only the remaining cards and turning back around when we got to the end of a line.
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