Teaching sight words to preschooler

[Kidlit]

My four year old dd (she will be five in May) is making good progress in reading via OPGTR. However, so far she has balked at learning sight words. Granted, we've only introduced the so far, but I comes up tomorrow. Does anyone have a fun way to introduce/learn sight words? Or should I just drop it for now since she's so young?

 

As a side note, I find that I second guess myself all the time. Will someone please tell me that this gets easier (in terms of MY self confidence)?!?!?:confused::tongue_smilie:

[Ellie]

My four year old dd (she will be five in May) is making good progress in reading via OPGTR. However, so far she has balked at learning sight words. Granted, we've only introduced the so far, but I comes up tomorrow. Does anyone have a fun way to introduce/learn sight words? Or should I just drop it for now since she's so young?

 

As a side note, I find that I second guess myself all the time. Will someone please tell me that this gets easier (in terms of MY self confidence)?!?!?:confused::tongue_smilie:

I don't teach sight words. "The" and "I" are not sight words; that is, there are good phonics rules which explain their pronunciations.

 

Perhaps the reason your dd "balks" at learning sight words is that she isn't ready to just memorize them by looking at them; she's pretty young.

[Kidlit]

Okay, so maybe I should just wait for those phonics rules to come up instead of following the OPG sequence completely. . .

 

Thanks, Ellie!

 

Anyone else?

[Chris in VA]

I'd just wait.

But--

I taught "the" by writing it on about 20 sticky notes and posting them all over the house. Every time dd passed them, she'd say the word. At the end of the day, we gathered them all and read them again. She knew the word by then.

[Laurel]

I wouldn't worry about it. I would not spend time trying to teach sight words. I would teach the lesson, but not drill or anything. Believe me, she will learn to recognize "the" and "I" pretty quickly with a little bit of reading practice. OPG teaches very few sight words, which I appreciate. By the time we've gotten to most of them, she's already figured them out from all her other reading.

[Julie in GA]

A fairly easy rule for "I" is that when a vowel stands alone, or ends a syllable, it "says its name." (Of course there are exceptions to this, and other rules that override it.) But you could say that the "I" stands alone, and has to talk to itself, and so it says its name (or something like that). :)

 

As far as "the," even though there is a rule, and also an explanation*, it's all too complicated for a pre-schooler, so I agree that it has to be treated as a sight word for now.

 

"The" is offically pronounced "thee" (the "e" is saying its name). However, when we follow it with a word beginning with a consonant, we've come to shorten the "ee" sound and it sounds like "thuh." For spelling purposes, always say "thee."

 

Yes, it gets easier, by the way.

HTH,

[ElizabethB]

My four year old dd (she will be five in May) is making good progress in reading via OPGTR. However, so far she has balked at learning sight words. Granted, we've only introduced the so far, but I comes up tomorrow. Does anyone have a fun way to introduce/learn sight words? Or should I just drop it for now since she's so young?

 

As a side note, I find that I second guess myself all the time. Will someone please tell me that this gets easier (in terms of MY self confidence)?!?!?:confused::tongue_smilie:

 

I would drop the sight words because they're harmful for many students, I've remediated dozens of children and adults who have had trouble after learning the Dolch sight words as wholes. You can teach all but 5 of the 220 sight words phonetically, here's how to teach them phonetically and why they are harmful for some students when learned as wholes:

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/sightwords.html

 

It does get easier...I practiced on other people's children when I started as a volunteer literacy tutor in 1994! I made a few mistakes with my first few students, but they still learned, they just didn't learn as efficiently as my later students did, I can now teach the same material in about 1/3 the amount of time.

 

Edit: I have a friend whose son also balked at sight words in K, I told her that her son was smarter than he looked, he must have known that sight words were not the way to go!

 

I also have a fun game that my students enjoy, my daughter started playing it at 4: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Phonics/concentrationgam.html

 

And, at that age, my daughter enjoyed working from a white board, you can read about how I did that with her in my Webster's Speller link below. You could use OPG from the white board as well, it's a good solid program.

Edited March 27, 2009 by ElizabethB

[myfatherslily]

My dd is about the same age as yours:) I agree, "I" really isn't a sight word. "I", "a", and the occasional "O!" (old hymns and such!) are the only lonely vowels you'll ever see. You say the long sound (which also happens to be it's name, for vowels).

 

For "the", I just told my daughter the sound for "th" and said you'll say a long "e", just like in me, she, we, he. And because we're lazy, we say "thuuhhhh", but she can say whichever she wants. Then I made made a little poster with a couple pictures that said, "The cat. The cat sat. The cat and rat." I underlined "the" and stuck it to the wall across from the toilet:) She'd sit there and read it to herself and it stuck very well:) She does have it memorized now, but she knows why we say it that way.

 

Sight words drive me batty, though:) I don't do them.

[KarenNC]

My four year old dd (she will be five in May) is making good progress in reading via OPGTR. However, so far she has balked at learning sight words. Granted, we've only introduced the so far, but I comes up tomorrow. Does anyone have a fun way to introduce/learn sight words? Or should I just drop it for now since she's so young?

 

As a side note, I find that I second guess myself all the time. Will someone please tell me that this gets easier (in terms of MY self confidence)?!?!?:confused::tongue_smilie:

 

My daughter was also 4 when we started, hit this point about 4 1/2. In some ways it gets easier as you see that, yes, she does learn, but in other ways, have to say that there will likely always be a bit of second (and third and fourth) guessing:). At least there has been for me.

 

There seems to be a difference in the way people use the term "sight word". For me, a "sight word" was any high frequency word that had not already been covered or was not being covered in the phonics lessons we were doing *at the time*. By high frequency, I mean words that are necessary to give the child access to even a minimal amount of reasonably natural-sounding content when they are just starting out with short vowels, for instance. While there were undoubtedly rules that governed many of those words, the lessons for those words were in some cases very far away in the lesson plans, so those rules were not relevant *at that time to that student*. OPGTR was not available when we were at this level, so I don't know the schedule they have. We were using Explode the Code because Phonics Pathways and Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons were pure torture in our house and ETC was fun.

 

This means that, yes, I did indeed consider "I", "the", "mother", "father", "you", "said", "my", "mine", "play", her name, names of her pets, etc to be "sight words" that were well worth my daughter learning at an early stage, well before she would have encountered them in the course of the curriculum. Without them, the content she could access was so unnatural that she had no interest in the stories at all--it was sheer drudgery and was killing her interest in reading on her own. She wanted to do "real stories" (her words)---reading that sounded like the stories we had been reading to her her entire life. Learning these "sight words" also gave her the confidence and fluency to be willing to read aloud to someone other than me. Dick and Jane was a turning point in that one for us.

 

Now I *don't* mean that we taught her guessing at words by their first letter or by their shape or any of that. I have found no use for those particular strategies. It was simply frequent practice and exposure--repetition. Jan Brett has some nicely illustrated materials available free on her site http://www.janbrett.com if she likes her books.

 

I wouldn't suggest making her stress about it, as it will come. I found that it was very useful to give her lots of exposure to those types of words. Mostly that came through reading aloud to her while she followed along in the book using her finger to follow the words. We also did reading turn in turn---I'd read a sentence then she'd read a sentence. Two of our favorite resources were the "Biscuit" stories by Alyssa Satin Capucilli (a girl and her puppy named Biscuit) and the reprinted Dick and Jane treasuries. We also played some games with a set of sight word cards that I picked up at Walmart or somewhere similar. I would show them to her and if she could read the word, she kept the card, if not, I kept it.

 

She quickly became and has stayed a very good and fluent reader, consistently testing well above her age level and reading constantly.

[Kidlit]

Oh, what a treat and blessing to wake up and find all this wisdom in answer to my question!!

 

Thanks, everyone!

 

My dd, like most children, LOVES games, so I think perhaps that making a game out of it would be the best way for us to go. I'll definitely be checking all the links left on this thread!

 

Thanks again!!!