Introduction to Sight Words

Many adults are not familiar with the term sight words (a.k.a. high frequency, Dolch, or wall words) until their children enter kindergarten. Beginning in kindergarten and continuing through 3rd grade, most educators, including parents that home-school, focus on sight word recognition as part of their reading curriculum.

While the exact number and precise words may vary slightly from teacher to teacher, sight words lists generally total 200 – 300 words and are categorized into kindergarten, 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade words. The words share a few common characteristics – they are:

• frequently found in English text,
• often phonetically irregular,
• mostly pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and verbs,
• generally service words which give meaning and direction, and
• difficult, or impossible, to represent with pictures.

Educators and parents work with early readers to memorize these words so that they are identifiable upon sight. This serves to jump-start the road to reading and provides children the ability to read beginner level books. Mastering common sight words also provides early readers the confidence to succeed in other reading curriculum areas (e.g. phonics). Er-u-di-tion, the sight words game, helps players master recognition and comprehension of 284 sight words in a fun setting.