Sight Words Overview
Sight words are those words commonly found in print. Depending upon the scholar, sight words lists consist of approximately 200 to 300 words that comprise over 50% of all English text. They are also referred to as high-frequency words.
In a child’s early education (pre-school through grade 3), many reading/ language arts curriculums include instantly recognizing high-frequency words as part of a balanced literacy program. Recognizing these words upon sight increases fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The ability to recognize sight words in a sentence allows emergent readers to focus on using other techniques like decoding with phonics and using context clues to read the more difficult and infrequent words.
Sight words include many “service” words like articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs and common verbs. These words typically give direction or meaning to a sentence. As a result, there are no picture cues or easy to understand definitions. In addition, many sight words are phonetically irregular as they do not follow spelling or phonetic rules which makes decoding virtually impossible.
Common characteristics of sight words:
Frequently found
Phonetically irregular
Visually difficult
Teaching a child to instantly recognize sight words provides the following benefit:
Instills confidence
Assists the decoding process
Enhances comprehension
Increases vocabulary
Fosters fluency
For more information on how Erudition can help your child learn to read, spell and comprehend sight words, click on the articles below.
