
They can talk about the letter patterns in irregular sight words that don’t follow the rules. Parents can review lists of sight words, including non-decodable words, with their child. There are strategies for teaching non-decodable words to struggling readers. There are also strategies for building phonological awareness at different ages.

There are multisensory techniques and tools parents can use to teach phonics. For example, these ight words: right, night, flight. Words with similar meaning or similar spellings can be learned in groups. Some common words don’t follow rules and can’t be sounded out. There are rules that can help them sound out words. For example, in the word said, the irregular part of the word is ai. It can also help to find the irregular part of the word and highlight it to make it easier to remember. It can help if students practice reading these words in meaningful sentences. Kids learn best when working and practicing with small groups of words on a regular basis until the words are instantly recognizable. Students may take these words home and work on memorizing them.

Teachers introduce groups of words to students, based on grade level. In the early grades, these programs focus on decoding skills. There are also other reading programs that are mainly used in general education. A few reading programs are based on this approach. One such teaching approach is Orton–Gillingham. That includes multisensory techniques to help kids connect letters to sounds. Kids need fast-enough processing speed to read words automatically and fluently.įor kids with reading challenges such as dyslexia, teachers typically use multisensory structured language education (MSLE). Kids turn a word into a sight word by mapping unexpected (non-phonetic) sequences of letters to their sounds. That allows them to quickly retrieve words when they see them. Kids need good memory skills to store words in their long-term phonological memory. Kids also rely on working memory to help them keep in mind the sounds at the beginning of a word as they decode the rest of the word. A sight-word vocabulary refers to the pool of words a student can effortlessly recognize. A sight word is a word that is instantly and effortlessly recalled from memory, regardless of whether it is phonically regular or irregular. This skill allows students to rapidly map sounds to letters and blend sounds to read words. Reading researchers have a different definition of sight words. Kids need to have phonemic awareness (part of a broader skill called phonological awareness). These words are used so frequently that kids need to recognize them instantly.) (Note: Some decodable words are also taught as sight words. These are sometimes called sight words, or star words.Įxamples include: right, enough, and sign. They need to be memorized so they’re instantly recognizable. Words that can’t be sounded out and that don’t follow the rules of phonics. Words that kids can sound out using the rules of phonics.
