Just say NO to sight-reading. There are 0 (zero) reasons to teach sight-words and sight-reading to hearing children.
Danielle, a proactive, purposeful parent, told me about teaching her son at home by the accepted, traditional, reading methods – alphabet names, capital letters, sight-reading, etc. Then her child "hit a wall" and she didn’t know how to fix it.
The sight-reading (popular in many preschools) messed up everything she had been trying to teach him. Luckily, she found The Godfrey Method and has been rebuilding his foundation properly for phonics. In her own words:
"My son, Jaksen, started showing signs of giftedness when he was very young, so my husband and I decided that it was best to nurture this and do what we could to keep him challenged. By the age of 2 he knew all of his letter names, uppercase and lowercase, and his numbers 1-10. He was potty-trained, too.
“He was doing so well that naturally we thought the next step should be sight-words. Initially it began well, but after about a month or so we noticed that my son was now confusing some of his letters for numbers, such as 9 for P. And he would guess at the words he was seeing and get frustrated very easily. For example, he would see ‘Clairebella’ and say ‘sister’ instead. From this he began to regress. So we stopped doing sight words, but we were unsure where to go next. We hit a wall."
With The Godfrey Method, Danielle reports that Jaksen now knows all his letter sounds and is reading words already.
The educational system has been going backwards for several decades, now. Many schools teach sight-reading in kindergarten. Many national-chain preschools teach sight-words. Several commercial, early-reading programs are also based on sight-reading.
As I keep warning, if your baby can read by sight-reading now, he’ll probably struggle with reading as an adult. My co-worker, Dave, was taught to read by the sight-reading method back in the 1940s-50s. He can read functionally but always wrestles with new words. His “Archie Bunker-isms” are hilarious.
My illustrator, Leah, says, “I have never met a phonics-learner who couldn’t sight-read, but I have met plenty of sight-readers who don’t know how to decode an unfamiliar word. As adults they must often guess and feel embarrassed.” This sad scenario can be prevented by teaching children to read early the right way.
So when and where do sight-words have a place in learning to read? Sight-reading comes as a natural consequence of sounding-out words. It is never the place to start. When a child has read the word “dog” a few times, s/he will begin to recognize it by sight. But s/he knows what sounds create the word “dog” and understand its left-to-right orientation. Even when sight-reading, children say the sounds in their heads, albeit much faster than before. They will be able to sound-out new or unfamiliar words reasonably well, too.
I don’t even use the sight-word method with those pesky “platypus” words that don’t seem to follow the rules. Actually, they used to follow the rules, but we changed our pronunciation. Or they follow the rules of a parent-language other than English, and we adopted them. Again, we usually changed the pronunciation to suit us.
Platypus words will be discussed more at the end of the Appendix of Vol. 3 of my book, It's Not Rocket Surgery!, but suffice it to say that if we pronounce them the way they look, most children will still understand them. We just sound like we’re speaking with a foreign accent. It doesn’t hurt to say, “thē” instead of “thuh.” Nor to say, “sāys” instead of “sez.” Nor “frī-end” instead of “frend.” Saying it the phonetic way before the popular way actually helps children remember the spellings better.
So when and where does reading by context have a place in learning to read? Never let a child guess at a word by context of the rest of the sentence. Never! The child needs to sound out the word. The only place for using context is with words that have homonyms or alternate spellings, and the reader needs to understand which meaning is used. “The wind was too strong to wind the sail.” For more examples by Sonal Panse, see Spy Code Rule 44 in the Appendix of Vol. 3 of my book, It's Not Rocket Surgery!
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