📚 📖How to teach your child to read 📖📚 Part 2: Sight words

What are sight words?
Sight words are high frequency words (or commonly used words) in the English language that we encourage our children to learn and memorise as a whole.

My previous post was mostly about reading by sounding out, and that's because the English language involves phonics. But there are lots of words that can't be sounded out (the exceptions to the rules) and for those words, your child needs to just know them by sight. I liken learning sight words to learning a different language e.g. Chinese. Chinese characters (words) are pictorial based and children just have to memorise each part of a character.

Some sight words examples are: the, was, come - if you try to apply Part 1's CVC beginner sound knowledge to these words, it wouldn't work. Try it with was, your child would guess that it spells like wos , and he/she would be right!

Ah the English language can be tricky!

If you're looking for sight words to start memorising with your child, there are heaps of freebies on the internet! Here is the first 100 sight words for you to download for free.

Now memorising sight words sounds like SUCH a bore for a 5 year old, I really have no idea how Chinese students do it! But for my daughter, here are my top 3 tips to make learning sight words fun:

1. Write it in sand
Next time you're at the beach, find a stick and together write the sight word your child is trying to remember in sand. I love free and easy literacy activities! If you are not near sand, pour some flour onto the kitchen bench top instead :) Perhaps before a baking activity to minimise waste.

2. Manipulate it with playdough
This is one of my daughter's favourite sight words activity, it's so hands on :) And great for finger dexterity. Simply roll out playdough and turn them into words. I have to remember to take a picture of my daughter's work next time.

3. Find it in picture books
If you have a "sight word of the week" e.g. "the", pick up your child's favourite picture book and get him/her to find the word "the" for you. In order to make it fun, why not use a magnifying glass and be detectives! Role play always makes things fun!

All pics from pixabay

The above are my go-to sight words learning activities, but depending on your child, there are so many ways to make learning sight words fun. E.g. if your child is arty, why not take out some wax (a candle is the easiest) and write some mystery sight words on white paper and have them magically reveal the waxy words with watery paint?

If your child likes to move, why not use our body to spell out the words? Make it into a competition to see who can make the most amount of sight words!

I hope that was informative and with some sight word knowledge, your child is well on their way to reading!