hand2mind Learn to Read with Bob Books and VersaTiles - Sight Words Set (Ages 3-6) | Sight Words Games, 10 BOB Books, 20-Page Workbook & 1 Answer Book, Award Winning
We recently migrated our site to a new platform. If you are having trouble finding what you're looking for, please fill out our contact form (/education/contact.html) first, before creating an Open Records Request (/education/about/administration/open-records-act-requests.html) . Family Guide Ensuring Successful Transition from Third to Fourth Grade (/content/dam/ok/en/osde/documents/services/literacy-policy-and-programs/strong-readers-for-families/2019-EnsuringSuccessfulTransitionfromThirdtoFourthGrade.pdf) The School-Home Links Reading Kits are a collection of research-based activities designed to help families reinforce the reading and language arts skills that their children are learning at school. The kits are organized to assist children in the following grade levels: Deann Jones Project Director, Reading Sufficiency (405) 522-4098 Melissa Ahlgrim Program Director, Literacy Policy & Programs (405) 522-1591 Chelsea Lewis Administrative Assistant (405) 522-8131 Back to Reading Sufficiency home (/education/services/literacy-policy-and-programs/strong-readers.html) Oklahoma State Department of Education Oliver Hodge Building 2500 North Lincoln Boulevard Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73105 Office hours: 8am to 5pm, CST Monday through Friday Phone: (405) 521-3301 Closed on all legal holidays As ubiquitous as colored pencils and alphabet posters, lists of “sight words” have long been a fixture in kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms. These inventories identify some of the most commonly occurring words in the English language, words that children will need to recognize automatically in order to read fluently. Often, the approach to learning them is rote memorization, learning to recognize the word as a whole. But as the science of reading movement has spread, researchers and advocates have taken aim at this method—and more generally, the idea of using “sight word” lists as an instructional tool. Children must be able to read words like “a,” “and,” “not,” “now,” and “come,” said Kari Kurto, the national science of reading project director at the Reading League, an organization that promotes science-based reading instruction. It’s just that memorization isn’t the route to get there. Decades of research has shown that phonics instruction—showing children how letters represent sounds and blend together to form words—is the most effective way to teach beginning readers how to identify new words on the page. When children learn these phonics patterns, and practice reading words using them, those words get stored in their memory. “Once you practice that word enough, you are able to recognize that word as if by sight,” Kurto said—no memorization necessary. A set of curriculum-evaluation guidelines developed by the Reading League penalize programs that teach high-frequency words as whole-word units to be memorized. But even as more states mandate that schools adopt explicit, systematic phonics programs, sight word lists have stuck around. They’re still included in popular reading programs, including some given high marks by independent ratings organizations , and lesson-sharing websites offer up thousands of results for sight word flashcards and other drills. In part, that’s because the English language presents some messy realities. Many of these high-frequency words are phonetically irregular; they don’t follow normal sound-spelling patterns. Others, like the word “her,” follow regular phonics rules, but are likely to show up in early grades books before students have mastered those skills in a systematic program. Figuring out an approach to teaching these words is essential, said Tim Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an author of McGraw Hill’s K-5 literacy curriculum, Wonders. “Commonly what you’ll see in programs, including programs I’m involved in, is you want kids not just to work on decoding, but also to read stories as part of beginning reading,” he said. “If you have to wait until kids can decode everything before they can read a simple story, you’re going to have to wait years, which is silly.” Calling the words on these lists “sight words” is a bit of an aspirational misnomer. In research, a “sight” word is simply any word that a reader can recognize automatically, said Shanahan. The lists in question are made up of words that have a high frequency in text, with the hope that children will learn to read them on sight. There are about 300 of these high-frequency words that make up three-quarters of the words in print in English, said Shanahan, though estimates vary slightly depending on which texts are analyzed. Most are articles and prepositions—words like “a,” “the,” and “for,” he said. “They’re not content words. They carry meaning, but a lot of it is grammatical.” When these high-frequency words are automatic for kids, reading becomes easier, he said, because kids can turn their brainpower to the text’s meaning. “The more cognitive resources you’ll have to think about the ideas, and deal with whatever’s hard in [the text],” he said. Instead of a list-based approach that’s divorced from regular instruction, teaching kids to recognize these words automatically can be woven into regular instruction, Shanahan said. For example, when teachers are introducing new sound-spelling patterns, they can make sure to include instances of high-frequency words in the practice items . The digraph th could be taught with words like “them,” “these,” and “their.” “When kids are learning to decode, in a way they’re really learning how to remember words and how to recognize words—which is what allows them to recognize words as if it’s instantaneous,” Shanahan said. Very early in their school career, though, students will encounter high-frequency words they can’t decode—or can’t decode in whole. “You have to, of course, teach them some of these irregular words, because it’s hard to have any sentence that doesn’t have ‘the,’” said Kurto. When these words are introduced, and in what sequence, could vary by classroom to classroom. “There’s not a research-defined list of, ‘You should teach these words at this time,’ ” she said. “Of course we have the Dolch and Fry lists,” she said, referencing two commonly used lists of high-frequency words. “But it depends on what you’re having the kids read and what you’re having them practice.” Exactly how to teach irregular spelling patterns in high-frequency words is up for debate. Research offers some conflicting evidence. One approach is to focus on the parts of the word that follow regular phonics rules, and build students’ understanding from there. For example, th in the word “the” follows regular phonics rules, even though the e at the end of the word does not. In this method, students would be encouraged to sound out the beginning of the word, using their phonics knowledge, and then learn that the e violates the regular sound-spelling pattern. This way, kids aren’t working with two different approaches to word recognition, Kurto said. “They’re still decoding.” Teachers can explicitly address exceptions to phonics rules, said Virginia Berninger, an emeritus professor of learning sciences and human development at the University of Washington’s College of Education. “We never let them think English is hopelessly unpredictable,” she said. A 2022 study from researchers in Australia found that when kindergarteners were taught to attend to irregular words’ spelling and pronunciation, they could read them more accurately than kindergarteners who were taught to memorize them. Words taught this way are often referred to as “heart” words. Students decode the parts they know, and then learn the rest by heart. But some words don’t follow any regular patterns—like the word “of,” said Shanahan. In those cases, he said, the easiest route is to have kids memorize the word. There’s evidence that teaching kids to memorize a small number of irregular words doesn’t interfere with their reading ability, as long as they’re also receiving systematic phonics instruction. A 2015 paper from Laura Shapiro and Jonathan Solity, researchers in the United Kingdom, found that two curricula—one that taught phonics, and another that taught phonics and memorization of high-frequency words—were equally effective at teaching young children how to read words. “At the very least, it’s not doing any harm to include high-frequency words,” said Shapiro, the lead author on the study, and the director of the Cognition and Neuroscience Research Group at Aston University in Birmingham, England. Some in the education community are “anxious” that teaching any high-frequency words by sight could confuse students who are learning phonics principles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, Shapiro said. Still, the number of words that students memorize should be “tiny,” said Shanahan. By the end of 1st grade, Shanahan said, students ought to know how to read the most commonly occurring English words, some of which are irregular. But they should know another 400-500 that they’ve learned to read through their decoding ability. The skills that children develop to map letters to sounds should be driving their reading progress, he said—not the handful of irregular words they’ve memorized along the way. All our latest podcasts delivered right to your inbox. Does your child avoid reading, get easily frustrated, or stumble over familiar words? These may be signs they ’ re having trouble with reading. In this episode, we talk to literacy expert Shaquala Holmes, MEd. Shaquala has dedicated her career to helping students become better readers. Listen as she shares: Tips for what to look for when reading with your child Ways to help kids grow their confidence, one word at a time How to help kids with reading at home (/en/articles/how-to-help-your-child-with-reading) Understanding why kids struggle with reading (/en/articles/child-trouble-reading) 7 tips to help kids understand what they read (/en/articles/7-tips-to-help-kids-understand-what-they-read) (01:20) Ways to assess a child’s reading level (08:55) How to spark an interest in reading (11:55) What families can do during reading time Julian: Reading is the foundation for success in school and beyond. But what happens when your child is having a hard time making progress? What do you do? What is going on, OG family? Welcome to a new episode of the "Opportunity Gap" in the new year. So excited that we are here in a brand new year. I am your host, Julian. Today we are joined by an OG expert family member from way back when. We go way back to the beginning of my introduction to the Understood family. So, we have Shaquala Holmes, master of education. She is a literacy specialist and an expert in supporting kids with learning and thinking differences. And she's here to share some helpful tips, tools, and resources with us. So, Shaquala, how's it going? What's going on? Welcome back to the show. How's life? Shaquala: Good. It's good seeing you. It feels like ages. Julian: I know, right? So, all right, so let's dive in. Let's dive in. We're talking about reading today and really about literacy. And a lot of our families might not be sure where to start when it comes to understanding where their child's reading skills are. Can you talk us through some very specific strategies that our families can use at home to assess their child's current reading level? Shaquala: Yes. So, I know you emphasized home, but I want to start with bridging home to school, because I know most of our families are in a public school or school setting in some sorts, right? So, I think the first thing, parents, I want you to do is partner with the classroom teacher to understand their screening and diagnostic processes. I know that sounds like blah, blah, blah, blah, right? But just like when you go to doctor, you take your kid to the doctor, they give them a checkup and they run you through all these things. And bottom line, you're like, "What do I need to do to fix it?" If is something wrong, right? Your teacher can take you through a similar process, right? Like, what is it that my child is struggling with? Like asking those types of questions. How are you assessing them? So, like, what are you using to screen? That means to identify if there is a deficit. And then diagnostic is what? How are you diagnosing my student and my child and providing prescriptive instruction? Right, so the first thing is ensuring that your child is getting what they need where they spend the bulk of their time, which is at school. And then I would, if that doesn't exist, so if that question comes up and there is no answer, your next step as a parent would be to request assessments. Like advocate for some type of assessment that gives those markers of where your child is in terms of their literacy development. And that starts in pre-K. So, there's assessments that your child should be receiving to identify where they are. And there's benchmarks that your child should be meeting at all of these grade levels. But say that isn't the case, like if there's a homeschool scenario, you can look at the state standards of where your child should be and you could have your kid read. Like, I know it's just simply open a book and a lot of books are level, like there's lexile levels. So, look and see like if my child was in first grade the lexile level that's appropriate and if you open the book what do you notice when you ask your child to read, right? Like do they have phonemic awareness? Are they aware that letters have sounds, assigned sounds to them, and that allows you to read words? So, how they engage with texts would let you know, "Oh they're guessing." And a lot of that came out during Covid. Parents seeing their students read with the teacher on the screen and their teacher was letting them use the pictures to figure out and guess words, read words around the words to figure out what that word is. Like, if your child is using any of those tactics, it's not good because they're going to hit a roadblock because the brain can only memorize so many words. Julian: So, what I'm hearing you say is, you know, really figuring out how to partner with the teacher and understand what assessments are being used to evaluate the child's reading level. You name-dropped a couple of those key phrases that you may hear in a conversation with the teacher, like diagnostic or prescriptive reading program or lexile level. Those are all things, families, that you should be aware of. And honestly, you can Google any of what those mean. Lexile level especially is one of those things that nationwide is used to rate the reading level or the grade level of a child. You may hear the difference between instructional and independent reading level. You know, the teacher might talk to you about this is what happens when your child is reading with help, that's their instructional level, versus independently, I give them something to read by themselves and they don't need any help. So, you know, a lot of things we're about to get into because I think just you touching on those things, these are a lot of things that our families, they need to know, right? Like, what are some things that if you hear it or you see it when your child is reading, that's how you know something's going on? Shaquala: Yes. So, granted, every child is different. Julian: That they are. Shaquala: And right now, if I think about a seven-year-old in first grade, 6 or 7-year-old in first grade, if you were to give them a grade level test, that means any book that's a first great book and you set a one-minute timer, they should be able to read 21 words in that one minute. So, that's fluency. That means that their word recognition is fluent. They are able to read at a rate because rate determines comprehension. That means understand what they're reading. That's a great indicator of "Is my child where they need to be?" You will want to, like I said, partnering with the classroom teacher Googling. Hasbrouck and Tindal has great research of words per minute that your student should be able to read at, at different great points. Like so you'll know like, "OK, if my child can read fluently, then this will help them with the comprehension piece." Julian: And is it literally just watching the child read and counting? Shaquala: Yeah, how they read correctly in that minute. Julian: How many words they're reading as they go? Shaquala: And I wouldn't even tell the child that I'm timing them, you know, because then they're stressed and all that. But you want to ensure your child is reading at a rate because a lot of times they'll read the books, like my son now, he can, he's 17 months, he can open a book and memorize the pictures, right? With the word. Like he kind of even knows like just by habit because we read the exact same book, because that's his favorite book every night. So, you would even want it to be an unfamiliar book, right? That's grade level. You can even ask the teacher, "Can you give me a book that you think back to that the child can independently read?" Independently more so in terms of grade level, though, because if they can't even independently read at grade level, that's a sure sign, you know, that there's something going on. Julian: What about if, you know, in the midst of them doing this, reading out loud in front of you and they may be mispronouncing some of the words as they go, is that an indicator of something or should we just let that go? Shaquala: So, I would look at how they are getting through it. So, if the word is "farmer," right? And they went "pig," right? Well, that was no, like that was you guessing, right? But if they went f-a-r-m-e-r like OK there's some phonemic awareness, this child is aware of letter sounds, right? But they may not see "f," "r," "r" control vowel, "m" "e-r," "r" control vowel. Like they may not know that. So, that's, we are working with something, right? I would pay attention to that. Do they stop and try to sound out words? And it depends on the age of the child, they may have created these workaround strategies. Julian: Yeah, coping skills. Shaquala: Coping skills to get through it, right? And it's so hard to unlearn bad habits, right? Especially when there's confidence and they're aware that they're not great readers. So, I would pay attention to do they try to attack the words? Like do they try to sound out the words? And if they're not doing that, that's the telltale sound that maybe they haven't received explicit phonics instruction or they don't have the tools they need to lift the words off the page. Julian: One of the things that you talked about earlier was building a partnership with the families and the school, whether it be a teacher, whether it be a reading specialist, and especially for our babies with learning and thinking differences, maybe it's their case manager to figure out how to build a team environment where we're all singing the same tune. In your opinion, Shaquala, what is the best way for parents to start that conversation when they may notice that their child is struggling with fluency or their child is struggling with decoding where their child really just doesn't like to read? What can they do? Shaquala: The first thing I would want to do is ensure that my child is receiving is explicit phonics instruction. And I know that sounds like, "Oh what is that?" Right? So, that means your child is learning all those strategies in terms of when they get to a word, what strategy are they using? Are they guessing? Are they dividing at the syllables, the syllable type? So, first thing you want to do is know what type of instruction is your child receiving. Julian: Now, should they send an email or should they call the school? Shaquala: I will have a meeting, so I will want that team, the team of whoever works with the child, I would want to know the curriculum.