New Strategies to Teach Sight Words

Miss W has a new show! Full episodes released each Monday on YouTube! Sight words are words that have irregular spelling that can be difficult for students to decode. They do not follow phonemic rules, thus, students are often encouraged to recognize them on sight. Hence, calling them "sight words". But rote tasks don't teach students how to apply knowledge and strategy. So, I've given a new technique a try to help students attend to the irregularities in words and use them as prompts to help them remember the word. I use "heart words" instead of "sight words". When introducing words, we discuss the spelling and the word, point out the difficult parts of the word, and place a heart over the letters that present a challenge when reading and spelling. For example, in the word "to", we discuss which parts of the words look normal and which parts are tricky (have irregular spelling). I place a heart over the "o" because the "o" doesn't sound like an "o" it sounds like "oo" but I want my students to "know this part by heart". This encourages students to talk about how words can sometimes look differently than they sound. It also helps them analyze words and the multiple sounds the same letters make in different words. When they see the word "to" they'll know that that part is read in a different way. I learned this technique from a fellow Instagram teacher and it's tremendously helped with my readers' retention of new vocabulary. It's got them excited and boosted their self-efficacy and self-confidence in decoding difficult words.