The main issue seems to be keeping her daughter interested, so she commits those words to memory. OPs attempts sound perfectly fine and in line with the Science of Reading. To use OPs example, "and" follows the rules better than "the." AND has three sounds that can be blended, while THE is a digraph and a silent e, which is tough for a little one, especially just starting out, to try phonetically. Of course, there are sight words that are easier than others. Knowing sight words helps with fluency, which in turn helps with comprehension because they aren't busy trying to use rules that don't apply to decode words that would make zero sense. They need to know their sight words so reading is easy for them at an early age and they can begin to comprehend what they are reading. The idea is they get exposed to them early on because those are words they will encounter often while reading. Students don't need to have mastery over blending before teaching sight words like "the,"which clearly doesn't follow the rules of basic sounding and blending. In a good, well rounded program, segmenting, sounding, blending, and sight words are taught concurrently. Sight words are words that don't generally follow the rules. There are also a few other accounts that I can’t recall right now. There’s an Instagram account called toddlers can read that has games that help kids learn to blend letters together to form words. Due to pressure from parents (some of whom, like one of my friends, have degrees in education and know what they are talking about), the school is working on changing their literacy curriculum to focus more on real phonics and less on teaching kids to read based on context/memorization/guessing.īasically, it sounds like your daughter needs to learn to blend letters together. There is some controversy going down about it at a private school,m some of my friends send their kids to. This sounds an awful lot like a style of literacy teaching that has received a significant amount of criticism recently for teaching kids to read based on sight/context, rather than actually teaching the basics of phonics first- it is the main way reading has been taught in the US for the last 20 years, and it is coming out that kids have huge gaps in their literacy knowledge, and are not really learning how to read well. I was just talking to a friend about this yesterday. I find it bonkers that the school is trying to force her to learn sight words when she clearly doesn’t have the most basic phonics/blending down first (which is NORMAL for her age, from what I understand). It sounds like she does not know how to blend letters. We also have an IXL subscription that’s supposed to teach her the Florida standards. They should know them just by looking at them. “Here are your child’s first set of kindergarten sight words. What helped your child learn their sight words ? I’m literally open to ANY suggestions or links ! TIA □□□□ĮTA: there was a typed note on the sight word sheet that was sent home, I took a picture of it but it won’t let me post it so I’ll write it. My son has always excelled in reading and is actually reading at a 7th grade level in 4th grade, so I even asked him if he can try practicing with her and it’s just not clicking □.
For months I’ve tried everything to practice basic sight words with her and out of 25 words she only knows 5 on her own. So my daughter is 5 turning 6 next month and is in kindergarten. Y’all I’ve reached the end of my patience and idk where else to turn □